That if "everything will be fine", or "we will come out of this stronger", "it is not a crisis, but an opportunity"... Hell is full of good intentions, but if you do not act when things go wrong, good words they are of no use. Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, 1965) puts humanity against the ropes when Rome faces the end of the world in Pregària a Prosèrpina (La Campana, in Spanish, Oración a Proserpina, in Alfaguara), in which Marco Tulio Cicero, son of the Rome's father of the same name, investigates the appearance of a mythological monster, the manticore, which heralds great devastation. What is found is worse: it is not a monster but diverse, the tectons –which had already made the Congo appear in Pandora in 2005–, terrifying beings that devastate absolutely everything in their path. Will they reach Rome?
Already in the first paragraph, the narrator warns us that "he has lived through the hecatomb of Rome and the end of human civilization", and that the origin of all evil is the impossibility of human beings changing: profound change as the only possibility of subsistence is the central theme of the book. Sánchez Piñol does not hide that his monsters are a clear metaphor of the wildest capitalism: "They are total individualism, they have no ties between them, no family, no State." The Roman Senate, like the UN, argues a lot, but nobody does anything. “What fault does the planet have for your political conflicts? If everything goes to shit! The tectons advance. Change or die, that's what the book is about, how some individuals, some societies, change or decide not to change, or cannot change. The same is happening to us, the tectons advance, they come and nobody does anything. What do you expect, Australia is under water to do something?
Throughout the narrative, the author explains the foundations of Roman society, such as slavery –which plays a central role– and adds fantasy elements, such as a kind of knight-errant with oriental values, the aspa, or the description of an underground world that he has been exploring since he was 14 years old: “I suffer from tinnitus and for me narrative is an escape, because the only strategy to fall asleep is to narrate, create stories, and then you forget about tinnitus and fall asleep”.
Sánchez Piñol explains why he wanted to place it in Rome: “I am not a specialist but it is a civilization that I really like, and when I get bored I read the Annals of Tacitus. It is a world that I consider very metaphorical of ours. I have also focused on the part of corruption, exploitation and injustice, since I have always been fascinated by the issue of slavery as an institution. It wasn't labor exploitation, it's that they considered them things! In the book I quote Aristotle, who says that a slave is property that breathes, and for a thousand years it was like that, they were furniture and had as many rights as a table. In this scenario, and without being a historical novel, it reflects "the great internal conflicts of society" while offering a reflection on the morality and politics of society.
Book after book, he maintains the same vision of literature: “When I was a child, the book was a dimensional door, it opened a new world for you. Little by little another conception has been imposed, which perhaps now is even in the majority, which is not to explain another reality, but to speak of one's own, the literature of the self. Talking about my birth, talking about my divorce, me, me, me... We are in decline, almost in a minority, and it surprises me, but I still write with this conception of literature as an escape”.
Beyond the narrator and the monsters, and in addition to historical figures such as Julius Caesar, the book brings together a group of the most varied secondary characters: "I had a great time developing them and sacrificing them, too, when necessary." As a creator, he sees himself at a good moment: "I am reaching a kind of biological and intellectual maturity, before the decline, and that is why the narrative is more elaborate now than when it started, they are technical resources that you have to work with, but when They work give great pleasure, like ellipses: you will see few novels with such beastly and efficient ellipses. It's impossible not to look at the next page." “I strive to make a complex story accessible to everyone, with complex characters that change in historical coordinates that not everyone knows,” he concludes.
An elaboration that also takes into account the myths in the construction of the narrator: at the beginning "it is a version of Siddhartha, the prince who leaves the palace, discovers that there is injustice and misery and pain and takes a moral position, here he has to decide between die or sacrifice the world”, then he becomes an Ulysses who makes his odyssey through the underworld, and finally “he comes back and is a transformed Cassandra who nobody pays attention to”.
Catalan version, here
