A love from Sara Mesa

Year of publication: 2020

Valuation: Highly recommended

Indeed, as you can see from the rating, I A love I liked it a lot more than Juan, and not because we disagree on many of our readings of the novel but because what he considers to be defects, curiously enough, I consider to be virtues.

Juan says, for example, that the novel focuses on an irritating protagonist: the translator Natalia, who decides to flee the city (and its very expensive rents) to settle in a rundown house in a lost (and invented) town, thus integrating herself into a line of Spanish narrative in which titles such as Praise by Alberto Olmos, In case the power goes out o Wolf skin by Lara Moreno the The inner limit by Nere Basabe. I agree, on the other hand, that Natalia, or Nat, is an antisocial, egocentric and irresponsible person, but… nobody said that we have to like the characters to be interesting. In fact, it is a defining characteristic of Sara Mesa’s narrative to build atypical, unpleasant, eccentric characters who make surprising or inexplicable decisions, which can even seem implausible, driven by instinct, need, desire or trauma.

In A lovein fact, Natalia will make several clearly self-destructive decisions (the fundamental one, the one that gives the work its title, will be to start a love relationship with… with one of the male characters, I won’t say which one so as not to spoil the novel for future readers) that may be based on a previous trauma, an underdeveloped explanation that personally seems somewhat simplistic to me psychologically speaking. The way she behaves may seem implausible or unjustified, but it is still humanly possible behavior, and Sara Mesa manages to delve into each moment of that process in a thorough and credible way.

Another thing that Juan says in his review is that the conflicts and the feeling of oppression that Natalia experiences in the village are not “real,” but rather respond to her own psychology and her previous predisposition. Once again, I agree, but once again, this does not seem to me to be a defect at all, but simply a narrative technique. Although the novel is written in the third person, the point of view is obviously Natalia’s, and it is a necessarily partial point of view, and in this case deformed by the suspicion that characterizes her. Thus, not only does the character of the landlord appear marked in a clearly negative way, but a distance is also established towards the characters of Píter (a hippie well-intentioned, although at times quite tiresome), the girl from the village shop, the “German” (a mysterious and silent man who, of course, is not German) or the neighbours, an urban and typically bourgeois family. This coldness and distance from the world is only broken when the “love” of the title enters Nat’s world, although, obviously, in the case of Sara Mesa it is not a love of unicorns vomiting rainbows, but something very different.

Finally, Juan and I agree on what I think is almost the only praise he dedicates to her in his review: throughout her career, Sara Mesa has perfected a clinical, functional style that corresponds perfectly with the emotional detachment shown by her characters. We might wish that the writer had opted for a more emotional, more exuberant or more groundbreaking style (like those of Mónica Ojeda or Andrea Abreu, to give two examples), but then Sara Mesa would not be Sara Mesa. And you have to love Sara Mesa (or hate her) as she is.

I know that I will not have convinced Juan (or the rest of the anti-mesistas on the blog) with this counter-review; that was not my intention either. I think that Sara Mesa’s aesthetic proposal has its own personality, established and original, and it is good that this provokes adhesions and rejections. Personally, I will continue reading what she writes with interest (and I have, in fact, pending The family), and if she maintains the level of her latest books, I will continue to review her positively.