beyond words

In a preliminary note to this collection, the author explains the meaning of his task here with this image, that of a “narrator before the fire”; a voice that wants to carry on the torch of hope, the torch of consolation: “All my stories,” he says, “are narratives before the bonfire, attempts to ensure that the fire does not go out, that the night is not completed, that it is irreparable.” ” In fact, regardless of the differences between genres, between the short story and the novel, Menéndez Salmón’s writings always seem to us to be immersed in the understanding of the world as a dark place from which there is no way out, where literature, art, Above all, its loss, It would have a soothing power to assuage the meaninglessness of existence. That is to say, the stories work with material very similar to that which makes up the author’s novels that we have come to know (from Crime to Children in Time, from Light is Older than Love to The System or Homo Lubitz), but for that very reason, As stated in the note, we can understand that today the genre that provides that moral sensibility, the form most suitable for the declared purposes, is not the story, but the novel, and we can come to the following conclusions: This is, in short, the most appropriate strategy for confronting “a permanent state of crisis.”

In any case, the stories chosen here represent an insistence on the same line; They reveal both the infrastructure of evil and terror (an inevitable extreme for the novelist of the Evil Trilogy), as well as the shock of the ineffable and desire. for beauty (the other side of his literature: light, which is older than love). Now, although all this demonstrates internal consistency, the twenty-one pieces that make up the book present very different settings, times and characters, always presented with full control and richness of resources: from a civil servant to a lieutenant or countess. From a house as ordinary as ours to the Nietzsche archive, from the workshop of the 16th century painter to the death trains of the Second World War, from jazz and Chicago to Montevideo, from the adventures of Russian exiles to the streets of Madrid; all this in a magnificent style that does not give up some near-caricature registers, such as the laconic and paranoid monologue of a Pascual Duarte fan or the duet between Astérix Macron and a Trump-like puppet.

It is true that the characters and settings on which these stories focus are preferably cultural; or better: about how the lives of painters and philosophers, the illusions and desires of writers, photographers and musicians move between the roots of social unrest, the contested meaning of art and the great absurdity of the world universe. However, if these cultural data refer to the model of famous painters and imaginary lives, it is also worth noting that, for example, Marcel Schwob or Borges skillfully developed and developed a literary form that achieved the right measure in their hands. Knowledge and literature are not exactly the purpose that throbs in World Furniture, however, because Menéndez Salmón’s stories find them in the lives of painters and writers, but also in the lives of unsuccessful artists, in the bitter fate of those who did not make it. good for nothing (“you’ll never be a writer”), these lives are an ideal arena for confronting the original anomaly, the sad state of our mortal body, knowledgeable and complicit in beauty yet in thrall to an inevitable evil. an enlightenment that seems to bring us closer to transcendence. Or, as the author puts it in a previous note: “All my stories begin from the vision of someone surrounded by darkness but with privilege.”

Darkness is universal, common, encompassing us all; The author’s talent is then transferred to many of his creatures (let’s talk about the Flemish painter Joyce, Nobel candidate Charles Mingus…), even the narrator’s personal characteristics filter through to many of his characters with some symbolic nods. or the geographical resonance in the traces of a journey, one’s own passion, the darkness itself.

However, the questioning of identity traces one of the most prominent lines of the book; this formed the basis of the opening story, “Blue Horses”, in which the classic dual theme is embodied in the double life of an unfortunate man. Man. But this doubt or question about the actual reality of the matter is also revealed in the superposition of destinies and the clash of names, in the more or less fantastic leaps and convolutions of time that erase, rewrite and confuse days, faces, loves. Here and there we read: “our life is not the same”; “There is a world within the world”; “a name is just a name is just a name”, “the egg inside the egg”… And for a strong, positive will to coincide with the paradoxical but not unusual questioning of one’s own identity, sometimes it takes a lot. the companionship of a similar person (even if it is a former partner: “Ancestors”), in short the search for an ally or soul mate “beyond words” (“The Scream”), a love (“To Our Loves”) as the world goes “up-down-up” ( “Terror”), with whom you will confirm his name and reason for living, as his incessant, relentless noise (“Background Noise”) continues.

Of course, when we enter the field of art, distortions, mysteries, forgeries, palimpsests emerge… but most importantly, obsessions. Because if the lie can find in that environment a space conducive to deception, what characterizes and motivates the true artist is the depth of his passion, the tendency towards the impossible, the ineffable, but before reaching the sublime, that clouded passion tends to flow. to the regions of disease, to the pit of madness; In fact, Menéndez Salmón closes this magnificent book with three stories that directly reveal fire, that wild animal darkness (“Vampires in Weimar”), suffering, and confusion, as grandiose as they are crazy (“The Life of Henry J”). Darger, painter”), and these perhaps express the same disappointment that can already be felt in the epigraph from which the book’s title is taken (“We (…) are the furniture of the world”, quoting David Foster. Wallace, himself a huge artist, is mortally helpless) and this culminates in the story “Beauty and the Beasts” – its end and its beginning – in which the beautiful and icy Catherine Deneuve contemplates the barbaric, disturbing creatures in the Tavera Hospital (Toledo), and the figures drawn by El Greco wander among the patients there, Beauty approaches the monster of death, touches the flame of art with her cold hand.