The covers of books are sometimes the perfect gateway to the text that the reader will find later. In these cases, the outside announces the inside, the images preform the meaning of the words.
I think that Juan Lagardera was quite right in choosing the manipulated image of Gino Rubert’s The Opening for the illustration of his first novel, Psicodélica (Ediciones Contrabando, 2022). In it, we see a series of characters with doll bodies and human faces who are part of a party. They drink, they smoke, they dance, they wander lost. Some faces of these creatures are recognizable: Freud, Jung, Carmen Alborch, Julie Christie, Antonio Vega. And the author of the novel is Juan Lagardera, who overlooks the main room where the party was held. Observer, witness, voyeur.
The voyeuristic spies in the pages of Psychedelic were the lives of a few young people in 70s Valencia, eager for exhilarating experiences, knowledge, literary and musical innovations, sexual adventures, experiments with ceremonial chemistry. joints, lysergic acids and anything else that can help make reality more intense.
Dozens of characters pass through the short episodes of Psicodélica, many of them well-known from vanishing Valencia (and contemporary Valencia), who emerge, shine for a moment, and leave never to return, as they do in real life. . is made of copious amounts of ephemeral information.
Juan Lagardera, in that poor and dazzling Spain, confused and in house slippers, wrote an emotional education, exploring the world by its main characters, a wonderful initiation novel.
It is a constantly changing text that does not claim integrity, is planned with cinematographic speed and immediacy. With some chaotic repertoire of people, as the world tends to be, and even the world of teenagers.
However, in the middle of this chaos, the adult voice of the narrator -his greatest success, his greatest achievement-, the adult voice of the narrator, who knows how to keep the appropriate distance from the events, thinks about the past and the present, and succeeds with his language, dominates. With his sense of humor, irony, intelligence, he gives meaning and humanity to the indecisive interpreters of his tragicomedy.
Psychedelic has the subtitle: It’s a great time. The 70s are a surprising and hallucinatory period for the narrator, a time of personal defeats and victories, collective transformations and failures, sound and anger, nostalgia and oblivion. Valencia has turned into a novel character and a literary scene, a Valencia full of confused teenagers trying to make ends meet, who will inevitably grow into adults over time.