Those who have tried it know it; there are few things more dangerous to a writer’s self-esteem than a book fair. You arrive there convinced that your presence constitutes a cultural event of first magnitude and you discover, after a few minutes, that the queue forming in front of your stand actually belongs to the neighbor, an instagramer, or tiktoker, or whatever, who has just published a book about how to overcome adversity through the responsible consumption of cherimoyas. The writer, who perhaps has spent two or three years on a novel, begins to wonder at what moment they took the wrong path while watching the young person sign copies at a dizzying speed. The conclusions drawn from these episodes tend to be discouraging. Book fairs and literary festivals have a lot of vanity bonfires. In them gather writers who compete for readers’ favor — I always recall that scene from Asterix and the Cauldron: “Buy, buy, buy my beautiful boars!”—, editors who compete for the favor of writers and journalists who seek to ascertain who deserves the privilege of their attentions or who simply let themselves go to see what might fall. There are also agents, representatives, prescribers, critics and a multitude of characters playing more or less mysterious roles. Sometimes, not many, literature is even talked about.
Vicente Luis Mora knows this ecosystem perfectly well and has decided to turn it into the setting of Nosotras (Galaxia Gutenberg), a very funny novel that unfolds during a single day, the 23 of April, in a Barcelona devoted to the celebration of Sant Jordi. Its protagonist is Coral P. Mengual, a philosopher with a precarious existence who faces her first experience as a writer at the great Catalan book festival. What begins as an immersion into the miseries and glories of the publishing business ends up becoming a disorienting adventure, a sequence of events that calls into question Coral’s certainties and, by extension, those of the reader. There is something admirable in the way Mora makes a circadian novel, initially bound by the limits of a single day, widen to dimensions never imagined. The time seems to stretch, reality begins to show signs of exhaustion and the characters discover that perhaps they are not exactly who they believed themselves to be. At moments, I have thought of Mulholland Drive, by David Lynch, or of Eyes Wide Shut, by Stanley Kubrick, two films in which normality ends up opening a door to unsettling territories, governed by rules that no one fully understands. I won’t say more, because a large part of the pleasure of this novel lies in letting its wanderings guide you.
However, before reaching them it is worth stopping at the portrait Mora draws of a certain contemporary literature. A literature we could call nifunifesca, for its astonishing ability to say absolutely nothing while pretending to reveal the great secrets of the human condition. They are books that offer vacuity wrapped in the trompe-l’oeil of an imposed transcendence, stories that announce themselves as transformative experiences and that, once stripped of their wrapping, barely contain four cliches. The truly extraordinary thing is that their authors tend to present them with a solemnity inversely proportional to their substance. It is not merely an aesthetic question. It also has to do with the gradual replacement of the work by the author who signs it. In certain circles, what matters is no longer so much what someone writes as the personality they manage to sell. The author becomes a brand, their biography an advertising argument, and their public appearances an extension of the product. It matters less to have written a good novel than to know how to convincingly play the role of the person who could have written it. And if one has a sufficiently moving personal story, perhaps there is no need to bother with the former. Mora enjoys dismantling these mechanisms, but it would be unfair to reduce his novel to a satire of the literary world. It can be read as a thriller, with its enigmas, its threats and its revelations, but also as a narrative essay on the cultural phenomenology of our time. Beneath its humorous surface runs a disturbing reflection on identity, the construction of the self and the fictions through which we try to explain who we are. The author plays with voices, perspectives and the reader’s expectations until forcing them to distrust what seemed most evident. And he does so without renouncing humor, which is one of the book’s great virtues. Among the numerous nods hidden in its pages there is a subtle mention of Juan Benet and an allusion to Javier García Rodríguez, a fitting note because I am convinced that Javier, with his dazzling intellect, his irony and that peculiar way of understanding literature as a space favorable to all games, would have enjoyed these pages like no one else. I also suspect that he would have found in it reasons to write some of those pieces in which erudition and irreverence shared a bed.
All in all, perhaps the best thing about Nosotras is that, after mocking almost everyone, it ends up taking literature very seriously. Mora seems to remind us that writing does not consist in crafting an attractive personality nor in wrapping banalities in gift wrap, but in building a form of knowledge that can only be reached through fiction. A task far harder than taking a photograph while signing copies, though also much less showy on social media.