A book a day: Carlota Gurt: Biography of fire

Original language: Catalan

Original title: Biography of fire

Translation: the author herselfa

Year of publication: 2023

Valuation: highly recommended

The author makes a curious warning in the index where the stories contained in this volume are listed. Read them in order and no more than two in a row. Curious instruction that a few weeks ago she heard how she explained in a podcast and that has a certain logic of vindication of the genre and the collection of stories as a literary aspect with its own personality and entity. Which is still aligned with a certain type of access to stardom (…) because today, although there are no shortage of exceptions, many authors use the short story as a kind of jam session, even a kind of testing of which register they feel most comfortable in. Gurt proudly claims and does not see the need to undertake the novel, although it was the first thing she published as if it were a go on.

Well. Based on what has been read in this fire biography There is no point in speculating. It may be true, hence the author’s curious instruction on the reading rhythm, that, without being more than punctually related, the stories in this collection can overlap in a certain way, seen as a whole, their protagonists, almost always middle-aged, in urban environments, with a certain educational profile, they are characters to whom things happen possible, perhaps there is some surreal detail, some nod to the greats of the genre such as Cortázar, Carver or Monzó, although here the dressing is extremely contemporary, and the framework of the series of stories is constituted by certain subtle coincidences such as the presence of birds (hence the cover, which seems to drink from the images of Chernobyl) or those slightly surreal approaches, modern stories without irony in the adjective: car trips, couples in varying degrees of (de)consolidation, curious hobbies – am I the only one who remembers that Richard D. James AKA Aphex Twin also bought a tank? – and a very subliminal perception that seems to permeate that continuity: the strange uncertainty of the middle class.

I hadn’t read Gurt until now. It may be, perhaps, because of the format, but I liked its direct and allergic style to the peripheral, its narrative poise even in the most modest stories. Funny, with these authors it usually happens to me that I stay with the longer developments, I will have developed an allergy to the short story. I have to say, I don’t want to be misunderstood, that his name was dissolved in a certain cloud that we could label as narrators/rather young/Catalanlately too homogenized by the industry (as if each publisher were afraid of running out of their own), but this fire biography It makes me curious about the rest of his work.

Also from Carlota Gurt in ULAD: Here