A book a day: Mary Gaitskill: Veronica

Original Language: English

Títutulu Original: Veronica

Year of publication: 2005

Translation: Javier Calvo

Valoración: quite recommended

Maybe one day you have to open a debate about something like expiration terms of a certain narrative, debate that, as we approach the times present absolutely (yes, in true part of the planet) conditioned by the overwhelming advance of technology and its irreversible real -time penetration in people’s lives, becomes more and more peremptory. And I do not mean aberrations how to make a novel based on WhatsApp dialogues or the until now failed attempts to integrate fe Literary, creativity and massive presence on social networks. Perhaps it is something more subtle and even behaves some contradiction with respect to the old literary essence: to transport ourselves to other situations, other times, other places. I could refer to some personal experiences: read the first novels (for example, Less than zero) by Easton Ellis today makes me feel strange. The lysergic excesses of the 70s novels (which are going through Burroughs to Kerouac or Pynchon) today seem to us from the stone age.

Veronica It is a remarkable novel, but its two reference headlights are on the one hand the fashion business and models and on the other the terrible impact of AIDS at the end of the last century. Not exactly two issues that have been left behind but to which reality has contributed marked nuances, and just as we are no longer in the nineties in which the models of the time (the Crawford, Campbell, Christensen, Evangelist) had become pop icons in an overheated world of consumption, luxury and excesses, the advances of medicine have contributed hope to the HIV. Two decades have worked these changes and the perspective of the moment of the novel has changed in such a way that it costs to even associate it with something possible. Alison tells us his story, that of a young woman who attends her physical decline, who has resigned her to her physical attractiveness has vanished and, in the middle of a messy access to her memories, evokes her friendship with Veronica, evocation full of confusion and ambiguity and without the possibility of contrast, because Veronica died from AIDS and Alison herself is seriously ill. Carrera as a model. It is curious that this figure, the convalescent or even agonizing that accesses a confusing flash-back of his vital trajectory reminds me so much to a recent reading (The abandonments) as the difficult Night of Chile of Bolaño.

Gaitskill has Alison of a personality of that time, making it oscillating from the strange indifference of those who find the world in the palm of the hand just in the twenty and the logical disenchantment after a life of excesses and emptiness. Veronica, the older friend and strange relationship becomes a kind of unfocused reflex. To some extent, a long set of any of the protagonists of their almost marginal stories of Misbehavior, A kind of prequel to this novel that gives off a faint but persistent unease.

More reviews by Mary Gaitskill here