Juanita Narboni speaks for more than 300 pages in the first person, without a clear narrative plot, through a continuous flood of ideas, events, comments, and emotions that could in some cases be classified as a monologue. and others, as a form of everyday speech in which only the hero’s dialogue sequence participates.
At several of the wonderful meetings held at the University of Malaga to discuss Spanish, I heard from Alberto La vida perra by Juanita Narboni (Seix Barral, 2021). For him it was the best novel he had ever read. I realized my ignorance on this subject and the need to read. So I took the last edition and read it. And I got it.
Through a short sentence, with the dominance of simple sentences and coordination, a speech that progresses like Juanita’s mind can be said to progress in seizures and onsets, requires a reading that must be timed with pauses. in the article. Colloquialism also helps to shape character by using a singular dictionary in his speech: French expressions to evoke a particular social ancestry (prestige question, p. 26); good for creating humor (“malgré le pêcheur d’Islande”, p. 35); everyday and vulgar words or expressions (“I’m peeing alive”, p. 28; “hija de la gran puta live”, p. 29; “bastard”, p. 31; “gang of pencas”, p. 43 ); and also for non-standard Spanish words: «memloca», «surraca», «jalufo»; “puñemas”; “table”).
This work was published in 1976, at a time when there were major attempts to renew and reposition the novel in Spanish. And its author, Ángel Vázquez, did not enter the usual canons of literature, that is, neither commercially nor academically, despite having won the Planeta Prize many years ago, in 1962. That’s why he wrote this work, where the protagonist lived in Tangier in the early 40s and witnessed a life style that gave up.
The author divides the story into two parts with 21 and 26 sequences, respectively, without listing the parts that he respects in the chronological order of the story. Juanita is unhappy from the beginning, stuck at home, has old morals but loves cinema and men, does not adapt to the society she lives in (“I have always been hungry and scared”, p. .25); On the one hand, he loved his mother very much, and on the other, he loved neither his father nor his sister, focusing on her and pouring out all his apparent disappointment. However, after this open individuality, he also expresses his views with a certain social conscience, because he thinks, for example, that the Bolsheviks are sometimes better than we think (p.35); or “Poor people die all the time” (p. 37), and also about Tangier: “Don’t play mousse with the remaining corpses, because there are only corpses in this city” (p. 221). His character is based on two negative pillars: everything is against him (“Unfortunately, I even have trouble falling asleep”, p. 47); and that he was always unlucky in everything (“Even the clocks are against me”, p. 47; “I had a boyfriend once, faggot”, p. 52). This character, as his name suggests, is highlighted throughout the novel through the parallel between his vision of Tangier and the future of his own life.
And why should you read this novel? Because this is what I call high literature, that is, there is a will to create art from real life, and it is unpretentiously accomplished with an extreme linguistic-literary exercise. And because Juanita Narboni is a character who should be with the great inhabitants of Spanish literature. And because the novels of the seventies and the likes of friends rarely disappoint.