Of course, anyone who wants to rediscover a well-written, well-crafted novel is to bet on Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell, bet on the winning horse. I discovered the excellent Hamnet (Asteroid Books, 2021) thanks to my bookseller, commented in the same column and recommended it to read (https://www.informacion.es/arte-letras/2022/01/08)/life-death-mourning -61360470.html) and I already knew I was going to read more about it. And so, before embarking on his novel published this year, I decided on Tiene que ser aquí (Libros del Asteroide, 2017) to get to know this author before the resounding success he experienced.
In its pages, I discovered and met Daniel, a male character for over thirty years, from his youth in the eighties to his maturity; It is built in relation to the characters who have always been a part of his life, namely his friends, girlfriends, wives and children. It is a singular form of characterization that responds to the fact of what we are in terms of how we act. Next to her is Claudette, a real movie star who wants to live anonymously. The author constructs a whole hive of relations with this relationship and all the characters, in which actions will remain in the background and emotions will come to the fore.
To do this, Maggie O’farrell tells a story using narrative sequences in the service of one of the defining features of the novel: fragmentation and elusiveness as a necessary aid, both narrative time and characters and even narrators. Each sequence is preceded by a sentence, followed by the next narrative, followed by the main character’s name, location, and date, regardless of chronological order. It also includes materials such as interviews or auction catalogs. Additionally, the narrative voice is multiple because not only the third person narrator is used, but also the first person structuring the characters/narrators. In reality, it is a controlled experiment of time, narration and space, very close to certain cinematographic techniques and by no means trivial. And yet it is not difficult to read, on the contrary, it becomes a good game for the reader.
But in the creation of the characters and the theme it deals with, it keeps it from being just a formal exercise. Whether they appear in a single sequence or in twenty sequences, they all permeate their performance or their emotions in the reader with ideas about lived time, endowed with astonishing believability: “All this sadness today stems from a vague feeling that life goes on. It is clear” (p. 382). ); on the couple’s relationship: “Marriage doesn’t end because of something said, it ends because of something unsaid. All she has to learn now is what it is” (p. 431); or about the loss of a loved one: «[…] in the afternoon, in that strange, distant and inaccessible time when nothing important happens, before life suffocates him” (p.361).
In this way, through formal entertainment and the depth of human relationships, a story that might be called a melodrama or romantic novel is defined (events from the past and disrupting the present; characters leaving their famous careers and disappearing; parents; parents). those who cannot see their children; deaths; lives split between two continents… and eventually), but it reaches a great dose of originality that goes beyond the scope of this label. Now, everything in the novel can get a little overflowing, especially for those of us who like a certain restraint, but it does it very well if that’s the author’s intention, of course.
And why should you read this novel? Because it is the perfect exercise for writing and building a plot where the interweaving of characters and narrative duration are brilliantly explored; and also, any of the characters that go through the story are an example of how the event should be built so that it in no way diminishes the essence. And as it could be the perfect read for a summer like this.