Architecture in novel

A few months ago, Irene Solà summed up one of her great truths to EL PAÍS journalist Carles Geli: “You can be contemporary from your hometown”.

She also manages to be cosmopolitan.

And eternal: it is difficult to decipher the moment in which what it narrates happens.

In his latest novel,

Los diques

(Anagrama), there is more architecture than engineering, despite the title.

However, as with engineering, many of the architectural elements construct compelling metaphors for vital moments, feelings, or even sensations.

Thus in

Los diques

there are foundations that –as also happens in life– end up being confused with lack of space:

“When they lived in the same house and saw the same things, the same diarrhea and frowns on the faces of the scrawny and sickly calves, the same swollen belly of a cow before giving birth, the same prediction of the weather after the news, the same bread knife and bread and all that, they didn't need to talk too much.

Now, instead, they speak more than ever.

They speak in detail about everything ”.

More information

• Irene Solà: "For now I have no intention of writing about what we are experiencing"

There is also furniture.

The furniture in a house has always marked the hierarchy in the relationships between its inhabitants: “Think that he is happy that it is summer and that he shares the spaces of the house with Kim.

His body, neglected and long, always occupies the large sofa ”.

"That the plug and the mobile charger are always occupied by the mobile."

She thinks that in September, in the house, only her and Victoria will be there.

And he imagines himself holding the house on his back.

Think of big houses with fathers, mothers and children that one day are left empty.

In the novel, as in many houses, the vegetation is controlled: “These are the plants, leafy and green like a jungle, on the terrace of the neighbor below Vicens. Vicens had to stop hanging his clothes on that balcony because if his clothespins, socks or underpants fall off, and he has to go down to get them, the man gets very angry. The children next door throw dominoes and Kinder egg toys at him, and the neighbor sometimes yells at them: Don't throw demon toys at me! and Vicens every time he hears him scream, he wants to sing to him

That Portuguese son of a bitch is

, because it is from Portugal. Solà shows that plants also accumulate memory: “The only thing Roser knew about his grandfather was that he had planted that rose bush on the wall in front of the house as a wedding present for his grandmother. The rosebush gave off shaggy pale roses, so full of petals they looked like a gunshot wound. Those flowers gave off a sweet and cloying smell like poison, which made the bees dizzy. Roser had short thick gray hair. The blue eyes so clear they also seemed gray, the square face and body, and the hands small and quick like the two mice. She was a clever woman who spoke little, and to whom it was not necessary to explain things to make her understand them. He had understood, for example, that if no one ever told him anything about Grandfather Jaume, apart from the origin of the rose bush,it was because his grandfather had been a bad man. If after you die your wife does not talk about you, does not tell anecdotes about when you courted her, does not tell stories of the days when you were funny, and does not say that she misses you when she is sitting at the table on your saint's day , and if after your death your children do not talk about you either, no and they do not transmit to their children the things you said to them or teach them what you taught them, and you have two grandchildren who, after the years, do not know who you are, It has to be because you did bad and despicable and poisonous things.And if after your death your children do not talk about you either, no and they do not transmit to their children the things you told them or teach them what you taught them, and you have two grandchildren who, after the years, do not know who you are, they have That is because you did bad and despicable and poisonous things.And if after your death your children do not talk about you either, no and they do not transmit to their children the things you told them or teach them what you taught them, and you have two grandchildren who, after the years, do not know who you are, they have That is because you did bad and despicable and poisonous things.

Cover of the novel Los diques.Anagrama

The house in the novel changes, like the rosebush, during the summer: “and this is Nádia, holding the child, with a watermark that crosses the waist of his swimsuit.

Nadia, tanned, in the pool.

The most beautiful of the three brothers.

As if the other two had faded.

The children less and less dark, less bright.

This is Nádia with long brown hair and small dark eyes and thin but full lips, Nádia who, without glasses, sees everything blurry. And this Kim, who sunbathes without a bathing suit, and looks at his cell phone from time to time, tanned and tall and wiry, with lean but marked muscles, a slightly sunken chest, dark nipples, and wavy golden hair. they fall on the forehead, seductive and carefree. And eyes like honey, and giant feet and hands. And this is Victoria, who reads a novel. And this is Lluís, who said, every damn winter, that they would build a work pool. To swim when they were old.

And this is the bricklayer, three autumns ago when, finally, they decided to build it, asking Victória: and "he wants me to put him at the bottom of the pool, with tiles of a darker blue, his name and that of her husband ? Victoria and Lluís in the background, in the middle and Victoria who gets nervous with the works that answered yes and these are the tiles that say Victoria and Lluís shining at the bottom of the pool, and this is Victória, who always tries to do nothing do not step on them ”.