"Fiction is the most honest way to approach the life of my godparents", explains the writer Laura Gost about the key to Les cendres a la piscina (Proa), the novel with which she won the fifth edition of the Proa prize, endowed with 40,000 euros and which was presented this evening in an event at the Macba conducted by Anna Guitart. The book will hit bookstores on November 15.
And it is that Gost (Sa Pobla, Mallorca, 1993) had started writing based on the story of his grandparents at the end of last year, seeing their end close, and they died at the beginning of this ten days apart, a fact that made him stick to the idea of the novel to "try to retain their lives". It does so based on the life of Sebastià, a man who starts as a farmer and becomes a patriarch who gets rich by building hotels for tourists. The different chapters of the novel speak from the point of view of the other characters, especially his three wives: "Catalina loves the man who was, Mercedes the man who can still be, and Leidi, the man who will no longer be able to be", says Gost, who adds to these characters other voices such as that of a granddaughter named Laura who is a writer, who does not deny that she assimilates herself: "It is an exercise in transparency to approach these lives and give a narrative to what would otherwise be a series of episodes", and it serves to "better explain who I am".
Sebastià is a man who "makes money and also loses it, and this generates ambition, a change in status and expectations that end up splashing his children and wives", in a chronological arc that begins in the fifties and goes through "frantic and transversal changes" until today. For the writer and screenwriter - she won a Goya in 2018 for the short film Woody
The author wanted to make it clear that in the novel she does not judge the lives of others, but tries to approach them without prejudice, starting from fiction to "understand the paradigm beyond the specific situation of Mallorca, a more human part that can be extrapolated to other places where the same thing has happened.
"It doesn't want to be a novel about the impact of tourism in Mallorca", says Gost, aware that there are already recent ones such as Tots les mecanismes by Melcior Comes or Contra el món by Pere Antoni Pons, or earlier the work by Antònia Vicens, and that is why he does not make any accusations or seek to redeem anyone, but "explain and understand", because he cannot assess what happened so many years ago "with the information we have now".
Throughout the novel, written with many dialogues, irony is used, "my favorite language after Catalan", as well as "humour, an antidote against solemnity", and it is peppered with cinematographic references - "life is never like in the movies" is a recurring motif - and musicals "as an environmental sphere that emotionally interacts with the reader".
A novel that Xavier Pla – member of the jury with Clara Queraltó, Anna Sáez, Vicenç Villatoro and Josep Lluch – defines “as if Antònia Vicens’ granddaughter now had a Mallorcan Sally Rooney as a sister”.
