For the effective previous campaign of a label enthusiastic about its commitment;
for the place that Sara Barquinero (Zaragoza, 1994) occupies on the front line of an overwhelming generational renewal;
for its 800 pages (the fetish of the billet as an indication of greatness still retains the power to
hype
the market)... For many reasons,
Los Escorpiones
is published this week as an event, and I bring great news: it deserves it.
I would like to clash with the tsunami of hyperbolic praise that is coming upon Barquinero, for the reason that it is something to talk about and also because sudden sanctifications tend to activate future threats both for the author and for those of us who continue reading it or reread it after a while. time.
But two things happen.
The first, that I believe in the book to the point of applauding.
The second, whether it convinces everyone or not (the consensus, what a suspicious destiny for a work), its solidity is impossible to ignore.
Precisely for this reason, apart from the predictable viral critical response,
Los Escorpiones
allows and deserves to encourage broader questions.
Let's start with the obvious: 800 pages.
I know, I know, writing a very long novel before you turn 30 has no value in itself, right?
Oh, we are all too clever to fall for such crude claims!
However, between you and me, let's be honest: Barquinero's muscular display is an
intriguing
gesture , unexpected because it was unprecedented among members of his promotion.
Hence a certain mamotretic morbidity... Then, you start reading and the real waste begins.
The thickness is the least important.
The most important thing is that the author makes the most of it to play with multiple narrative models, travel in time and between continents (Spain, Italy, the USA...), alternate techniques or voices, and all this without almost ever losing stylistic coherence or a deep-rooted consciousness of the times.
In terms of profession, maturity is overwhelming.
As for talent, we knew about him since
I'll be alone and without a party
(Lumen, 2021).
I haven't read his debut,
Terminal
(Milenio, 2020): I already have homework.
It is surprising how naturally Barquinero juggles narratives of a thousand types.
It sustains a story that fits into the recent rural Spanish novel for a hundred pages to finish it with a tense 'Carrie'-style crescendo.
A novel that contains novels,
Los Escorpiones
could be summarized in many ways, that is, there is no one who can summarize it.
Even so, I offer you several attempts: it is the story of a conspiracy that was born in proto-fascist Italy in 1922 (a fundamental year for modernity, very well chosen) and lasts until 2025. It is a gallery of exhausted, bewildered, addicted characters, paranoid and, in a strange way, beautiful, with the adventures of Sara and Thomas as a thread that brings the rest together.
It is a genealogy of video game culture and especially of the internet, with coves in its anarchoid origins, dark corners of the
deepweb
, forums with a 90s and 20s flavor,
creepypasta
mythologies , chats.
It is a look at the suicidal impulse capable of investigating its allegorical possibilities while delicately penetrating intimate conflicts.
It is a hypothesis about sound as a totalitarian binder of the world in the face of the cliché of the hegemony of images (okay, I have decorated myself a little here, but the idea is so suggestive!).
It's, it's, it's...
It is surprising how naturally Barquinero juggles narratives of a thousand types.
It sustains a story that fits into the recent rural Spanish novel for a hundred pages to finish it with a tense
Carrie
-esque crescendo (by the way, is it me, or are there family resemblance to Sara Mesa from
Cicatriz
and
Un amor
?).
Set design a striking atmosphere of Roman aristocracy between the wars that mutates into carnivalesque atrocity filmed by Julia Ducournau.
There is terror a la Mariana Enriquez but also a la Danielewski or BR Yeager.
When you get into the
street chase
thriller , it sounds like a psychological portrait.
Etc.
And if so many echoes and strata summon before you the ghost of pastiche, scare it away immediately:
Los Escorpiones
dazzles with the precision of these assemblages, at the service of a pathos that, despite the cerebral or semi-distant or narcotic tone, knows how to move us (Luna Miguel has confessed on Goodreads that the book “defended me, from myself” during a depression, and I believe it): sadness and exhaustion and, suddenly, agonizing loyalty.
For the rest, the novel introduces several twists in the literary conversation that Gen Z has been having among themselves and with their predecessors.
It is immediately striking that both the epigraphs and the
blurb
by Elisabeth Duval allude to Vollmann, Foster Wallace, Pynchon or DeLillo, a postmodern lineage that had been missing in combat for nearly a decade as a decisive influence on young voices.
The result is curious: Barquinero rescues his paranoia and arborescence, but fits it into a very different prose.
Faced with the digression or density of those,
Los Escorpiones
urbanizes conspiracy obsession/madness through an orderly, contained, less hypotactic style.
Readers who forge our own “modernity” in
Underworld
or
V.
may at first feel the change as a loss until we sense that, in reality, it only confirms their definitive entry into the canon (and ours into History), sufficiently classics. distant for a narrator to search for current tools in them without paying attention to dogmas.
And facing his contemporaries, Barquinero expands the battlefield from complicity.
All the concerns of their generation are present, acceleration, gender identities, the shrinking of the horizon, the body and its virtual
doppelgänger
... It happens that
Los Escorpiones
overcomes introspective, confessional or proximity tendencies (without giving up its strengths, without discarding them ) by integrating them into a larger network that connects ages, periods, landscapes, plausible imaginations beyond one's own experience.
Perhaps it vindicates fiction and ambition.
Perhaps, paradoxically, his role ends up being more similar to that of Jonathan Franzen when he claimed to return to the best of the nineteenth-century novel and connect demanding literature with a renewed public.
I'm dying to find out what the real impact of
Los Escorpiones
will be beyond the practically inevitable success of 2024.
Look for it in your bookstore
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