A book a day: Camila Fabbri: The dancing queen

Original language: español
Year of publication: 2023
Valuation: recommendable

At the risk of, at this point, inventing the Re-member-sign I’m going to have to indulge in a somewhat futile digression.

Today, May 13, 2024, the review is published four days later, I have to return my copy of The dancing queen to the Barcelona library where I borrowed it. In fact, there are four other requests for the book after mine, so I understand that the book is requested and there are at least four potential readers, let’s say, somewhat impatient for their turn to come. This implies that I obtained it just a month ago, and that surely as soon as I got hold of the copy – I suppose because of some comment or some review that aroused my curiosity – it would not take (the novel does not reach two hundred pages) more than a week to read it so, bad habit that I have of waiting for the day to publish to arrive before writing it, I start writing it on the 12th, and I have to make a mental effort to remember memorable details. From a book that was a finalist for the Herralde Prize.

I mean: this is a novel with a modern structure, although somewhat conventional. The chapters jump back in time and tend to converge: we begin with a traffic accident with our protagonist and a teenager in the vehicle. The game of tragic chance is set in motion and it seems that the entire novel focuses on solving a certain enigma: what are those two people doing together in that vehicle, when the evolution of the plot does not relate them at all. The protagonist has separated and has traveled to a friend’s house and a dog with a curious name (or curious last name) is walking around but, things about modern structures although already somewhat conventional, there are no major plot surprises apart from those very facts. today, the pairings, the separations, the existential dalliances, a certain generational anguish of that age range between boomer y millennial. Everything is just OK, although the back cover has more than glowing praise from writers of a certain profile. The alternation of chapters and the different tempos They provide a certain air of suspense. Although we know that the accident has not had devastating effects, time is frozen while the helps, they free them from the vehicle, put them in the ambulance and go to the hospital. In the other plot, everything is more extensive, there is the relationship, the breakup, that kind of aimless escape, perhaps too structured for everything to remain like that, open, stimulating, impeccable from the narrative point of view.

And again, the doubt. Luckily (I remember very vaguely Crash, a somewhat sick film, I seem to remember, by David Cronenberg, in which people who had suffered traffic accidents related in a somewhat shady way) this is not a novel that dwells on the coincidences that hide behind certain types of tragedies. More than morbid, I would say that it is a dynamic and rather hopeful novel, or not entirely hopeless. But that worries me, that in three weeks his trace will fade to the point of not retaining a scene, an image, a paragraph.