La Gris is forty years old, she recently lost her father, she is divorced and she is unemployed. What from here was supposed to be a trip to Catalonia to learn about her family origins is transformed when the discovery of her relatives leads her to look for a family treasure that had been lost. With this premise, Sílvia Soler (Figueres, 1961) builds Estimada Gris (Universe), which investigates the search for an identity based on family and roots, but also on the different types of love.
The novel has three plans, Gris's misadventures, the letters she sends to her sister Adriana, jealous of the departure, and a familiar frieze of the different love relationships that make up the extended family: starting with the maternal grandparents and fathers goes on to explain their stories, which include a Catalan grandmother who integrated into Mexican culture at the hands of a very domineering husband - and five daughters, the Alzuera sisters, with their respective subplots - and a Catalan grandfather who he died missing his land and his language and had kept some customs, although he educated his son in Spanish: "It seems to Adriana that to come here Gris is giving up her family and her homeland to have -another one. No, identity is flexible and multiple and elastic", explains the writer, and asks "where are you really from, where do you grow, where were you born or where do you have your roots? My whole family is from Figueres, and I was born there, but I have never lived there and I have been living in Badalona for 30 years. And it's ridiculous, talking about exile, but this feeling of not knowing where I'm from, the issue of uprooting, has always obsessed me and I wanted to reflect on it".
In the end, he says, "the only possible conclusion is that I have spread my roots and you choose the place". And you do what you can: "Many Catalans who went to Mexico began to speak Spanish instead of maintaining Catalan, which could be seen as a renunciation and, on the other hand, for me it is a clear intention to integrate to the society where you go and that the children are already from there, although often there is also longing". In fact, he points out, "the family is my subject, but here it is almost the excuse to be able to talk about uprooting and exile". And of love, because "instead of explaining the family from any other point of view, I make a sample of all the love relationships, of all the ways of loving, valid and not so valid, which is like a thread that runs through the whole story".
Imbued with Dalí's landscapes, the novel also takes advantage of a family myth that has to do with the painter – his parents were friends of Soler's grandparents – and that moves the threads of the narrative until the end. However, the writer assures that the seed of the narrative was simply the name: "I met a girl called Gris, and I thought it was a very beautiful name". But was she Mexican? "No, she's Argentinian and lives in Badalona."
