“When you get older, the feeling of death is closer and you think about it more than when you were ten years old. It's not that I worry too much, but sometimes I think if there is something later. If you are Catholic you have it very clear; If you doubt, you are less clear," explains Carme Riera (Palma, 1948), who begins her new novel, A White Shadow (Alfaguara/Edicions 62), with a famous American opera singer coming back to life after having suffered on stage. a heart attack.
But Barbara Simpson is not just any singer, she is a great diva with a past that she must resolve, especially when she comes into contact with a doctor who scientifically studies the so-called "near-death experiences", and it is from him that Simpson, o Barb, or Baba, introspects on her childhood to find the solution: “The main question of the novel is the return of someone who is clinically dead but, as in so many cases, returns to close a pending issue. And this question has to do with the childhood trauma suffered by this singer and what it means to definitively confront it, but in order to return to that place of light she needs to resolve it.”
The narrative takes the reader first to deep South America, during the time of racial segregation, where he will learn how his parents, traveling musicians – and magicians – who live in a caravan, with very poor beginnings, met. Little by little the writer leaves clues about the world that surrounds the protagonist until she arrives at the invented town of Fosclluc, next to Deià, in Mallorca. But the one who transcribes her life there is not only her secretary, Rose Barnes, but she is helped by a Mallorcan writer named... Carme Riera: “I enter history as a journalist, which is what I would have liked to be when I was young ”. The language, in Catalan, at this point departs from the standard and opts for Mallorcan "from the time, because I remember how it was spoken in the sixties in Deià", a richness that recognizes that in Spanish it has had to be nuanced, that "it has “It has been more difficult, but there are repetitions to maintain orality.”
In fact, Fosclluc becomes a kind of character, including the Teix mountain, from which Riera invents “the legend of the White Goddess,” which contains some keys to the novel. “We have destroyed and desecrated nature, which was the goddess of the mountain and was the mountain. It's terrible, we walk through the mountains so much and only find plastic and cans. And people and people and people. It's a drama that I don't know how it can be fixed, because people have the right to go places. My legend is pious, only he who takes care of the person who has fallen will arrive.” Also for this reason, in the book "it is important to do justice to a person who has been convicted for acts that he did not commit, there is guilt and there is redemption," explains Riera, but being clear that children do not have to bear the blame of parents.
The whole story also has to do with memory and remembering, how sometimes we lie to ourselves or reinterpret reality to overcome trauma. “But don't think we know that much about the characters, we, they make their lives,” says the writer.
Catalan version, here
