Catherine Lacey. Biography of x

Original Language: English
Títutulu Original: Biography of X
Translation: Nuria Molinés
Year of publication: 2024
Valoración: highly recommended

Surely I will be misunderstood, but I don’t just understand the effort to assign certain labels to certain cultural products. The point of the book that accompanies the brand new exemplary taken from the library of this Biography of x says this novel belongs to LGTBIQ+ background And I wonder what noses you have to limit it that way. I would put, for example, the figure of Spanbauer, already deceased, and I shake my soul to think how many great writers are confined in this kind of ghetto/subgenre that can, however cenutrios that these approaches may seem, limit some readers. All because, great novelty, ladies and gentlemen, this is a novel about a woman trying to delve into the past of the woman who was her partner. That genres could be exchanged naturally and history would not change. That this choice is not a commercial hook or a positioning, that we must act naturally or we have what we have in some cities: neighborhoods condemned to be thematic parks, points of attraction of a certain morbid curiosity that seems to exclaim Let’s see them behave in their habitat.

This disquisition would be meaningless if Biography of x Out of many books. But not. Catherine Lacey, for whose previous work I will be interested immediately (four novels, not bad for a writer who has not yet been forty years old), she shows her daring in the structure of this narrative. At first, something reminiscent of the game used by Hernán Díaz in Fortunabecause we are playing the Chinese boxes staging a narrative within another, but rather adapting the resource to narrative need. Here we have a writer who, to counteract the foreseeable appearance of unauthorized texts in the form of Biographies of xthe woman who died being her partner, decided to investigate on her own past. A past with huge unknowns that will try to solve. X has been a multidisciplinary artist: he has made music, written books, starring performances: a kind of total celebrity in a nation that (small and some forced resource that almost explicitly evokes Atwood) has re -joined after a conflict that has divided it into a conservative and traditional south and a progressive and open north. CM Lucca enters the past to the search not only for memory to do justice, but also what his doubts and those gaps that he could not elucidate when X lived when he lived. That search, of epic tones, will help her to understand in part the personality of who her partner was. As expected, it will carry not a few surprises that, rather than contributing morbidity or concern, they will delve into the complexity of their relationship. Couples, marriages, some son from whom he fell fledged, an eventual political dissent that forced her to frequently change names, appearance, to incorporate layers into her personality and redouble the mystery and fascination over her person.

Lacey is a writer (I suppose that reading her previous, shorter and less renowned novels can clarify that opinion) ambitious and wide range. Maybe excessive, Biography of x It contains that retrospective air of Bolañianos that combines perfectly with the European aroma that some references give off, from use sebaldiano Of images that seem generated by AI, even varied cultural references that are interspersed and assigned a personal context (to link it to the creative process of Low, one of David Bowie’s masterpiece, has seduced me by its insistence) in which the artist would be a kind of muse in the shadows of the underground culture. We also perceive a criticized criticism towards the contemporary artistic manifestations most marked by the eccentricity and the wishes of controversy as a celebrity form. X excites fame and relevance just to run. It is not a fierce criticism, it is rather a staging of situations that can be familiar to us so today is the world of cultural manifestations. I suppose that this justifies the dystopian approach: a world, the north, of creativity and freedom vs A South Sojuzado by religious integrism. Although, personally, I think it is the bet that works less, allow me to insist on the paragraph with which this review undertook: adjective to this remarkable novel seems restrictive and narrow of sight. With their shortcomings and mistakes, it is worth reading this book.