In autumn, the Planeta Award arrives, targeting the Christmas advertising season. And with the Planet, like another pre-Christmas tradition, comes criticism. According to Jordi Gracia from the pages of El País, this year’s awards painfully reflect the reality of the award, although it has gone even higher, to the point of self-immolation. And this is true. You rarely read such harsh and well-founded criticism; This reminds me of the review Ricardo Senabre published of Nadal in 1996 on ABC that year. Now, sometimes, occasionally, the reward surprises you for the better; just like in 2019 with Javier Cercas and Terra Alta (Planeta, 2019) and, above all, Manuel Vilas’s finalist Alegría (Planeta, 2019). Therefore, these weeks I re-read the latter’s novel, then even before I opened it, it had already won me over. He’s as impartial as possible.
Although it was not promoted as the second part of Ordesa (Alfaguara, 2018), it is true that it took advantage of its success to become a finalist for the 2019 Planeta award; because, given the literary nature of this author, it seemed to me that he did not fit into the broad clientele of this prize.
The saying “second chapters were never good” is irrelevant in Alegría, because it is good, although it is true that for me it lacks the surprise factor, and so you will enjoy Ordesa differently if you have read it before. . The reader meets the author again from a first-person perspective, describing almost the same things and situations as in his previous novel, but in a slightly lighter way, showing already digested emotions and, in a way, far from the great poetics of the previous one. but with wonderful moments like orange juice (p.26-27). Herein lies part of its appeal. In Alegría, the unifying aspect of the novel, not its plot, is the anarchic journey that the novel, written in sequence number 107 with the same formal features, went through before reaching success halfway across Europe and America.
The obsessions are also the same, but first of all the vision has changed, not the reason for creation. There is no longer any need to justify anything, on the contrary, everything that produces the feeling of joy is accepted, this has little to do with cheerfulness, but rather self-acceptance and the personal pleasure that this entails. This concept is taken from some lines that José Hierro read in a brochure in the Madrid metro, the beginning of which was “From pain I reached joy”, and which he himself wrote in the first paragraph of his book: “Everything we do”. love and we lost […] Everything that cannot destroy us after its loss, […] Sooner or later it turns into joy” (p. 9). Because the novel, like his previous works, is an exercise in gratitude to life.
He now changes his characters’ nicknames to actor instead of musician in the previous one; and his second wife, Mo, seems like the perfect person with whom he could share his life; and the creation of the character Arnold in honor of the inventor of twelve-tone speech whose head had to be explored; and most importantly, they conceptualize their children as manifestations of close love and raison d’être; Yes, without their mother ever showing up. And as the framework and background of everything, his own parents who flood everything. This is what he eagerly awaits, this is what will truly shape his joy, with the thesis that all the reflection he has about his father should now continue in its effect on his children. A pleasure.
So why should you read this novel? Because it is a novel that insistently emphasizes the idea of being grateful to life and understanding ourselves as we are, both from our own history and in our future projection that we have lived in for many years. And the best thing is not his victory, but the reality of his invincibility and perhaps more importantly his state of joy, I understand the emotions very well because I know them and can share them with him in his novel.