Original Language: español
Year of publication: 2025
Valoración: Highly recommended
And I must say that, within this new chapter in the author’s work, Everything starts with the blood I liked even more than The heirsthat I liked it a lot, perhaps because the issues you raise have appealed to me more, if it can be said so.
In this novel we accompany the inexhaustible process of existential, loving, sexual, violet search, from his childhood to adulthood (whatever that means): A constant search for meeting, recognition, love, completeness, a kind of insatiable hunger, which could be identified with a primary wound that never hesates. In the words of the narrator herself, it is “the search for someone who now exists, somewhere uncertain, with an identical vacuum and voracity, willing to follow the steps of the other to the very cliff.” A search that can be turned into a loving or sexual partner, or almost always unsatisfactory love of the father or mother, or also in divinity, since it is about “[una] Sadness for everything and nothing, the feeling of lacking an organ whose absence moves through the body, the yearning of God. “
(I clarify, by the way, that the narration is not chronologically ordered: although there is a general progression, as I said before, of childhood to “adulthood”, which makes it
Everything starts with the blood be almost, only one coming-of-age novelthe fragments that make up the text do not necessarily follow this temporal order, since they include leaps to the past or to the future, also marked by the verbal times in which each of them are written. So, Everything starts with the bloodas the text itself says, “It is not a straight arrow towards the future, but, in fact, a constant repetition, cycle and recycling“).
The blood metaphor, which arises from the title and from the first sentence of the novel, replicates this multiplicity of possible paths. The novel begins with a children’s scene: a blood pact between two girls, which will be repeated as an echo throughout the work. The blood that unites us to life, which unites us to others, also the blood of the birth with which “everything begins.” Later, blood refers to menstruation, or a hemorrhage produced by an abortion, or the blood necessary for a transfusion … blood is the danger, the death that lurks, but also life and its celebration.
Blood also has another obvious meaning: “blood of my blood”, the biological inheritance, the family. In Everything starts with the bloodas in Change your mind, We meet again with an absent father, and with a stormy relationship with the mother (although I must recognize that it has tender me to perceive a certain reconciliation with the maternal figure, which is manifested in fiction, but also in the fact that Aixa de la Cruz itself appears in the thanks). However, just as it happened in The heirsbut even more explicitly, one of the central ideas of the work seems that the family is not necessarily that with which we share genes, but the “tribe” in which we feel welcomed and supportive, is a kind of “commune hippie Rural “, a convent of nuns or an open relationship with a man or with a woman.
On the other hand, blood, as a vital and bodily element, as an organic element linked to the heart, is linked to another of the great themes of the book: desire, and its multiple variants and surprises. Violeta, the protagonist, navigates her bisexuality as the narrator of Change their ideabetween acceptance and self -exposure. Sex (which, says one of the characters in the novel, is difficult or impossible to separate from attachment) is another way of “satisfying God’s void with something tangible, before God.” (Several times throughout the reading I have remembered that famous poem by Cernuda who says that “desire is a question whose answer does not exist”). With his girlfriends or lovers, with his occasional relationships and his Platonic crush, and especially with his omnipresent Paul, the homosexual man who never stops remembering and desired, Violet explores the pleasures and abysses of the body and delivery, the fever of desire and the coldness of abandonment.
And then, at the bottom of everything, as a continuous bass, there is Paul, the gay man with whom Violeta dreams since adolescence, who always returns even when he seems to have definitely disappeared, turning this novel into one of those great love stories to which the protagonist herself is as fond of as a reader: an unmporal love story, in which the characters seem to succumb to a destiny that are imposed on them, despite all the laps that they want to give them, despite them, in spite (And there is no doubt that Violeta gives many turns). After all, as you think violent, they are “Twenty years putting it to the test to verify that yes, that resists, that there are no conditions. That there is a love to the shame of being alive. ”
Personally, not as a literary critic (again, whatever that means) but as a reader, I do not know if that insistence on the eternal love that is imposed by stubbornness, but I believe that because of it, Violeta ends up renouncing other options and other relationships, and even being unfair to some of the people around it; Paul himself de fact reproaches him, metafictionally: “You have a dangerous, violet ego. As if you were the protagonist of the novel, and the others, your secondary characters. “ In any case, this last appointment also allows me to recover another idea: that it would not be a work by Aixa de la Cruz if there were not at least a certain burden of reflection on the writing process itself, about the relationship between narration and memory, or about the limits and fragilities of literature, art, identity. Perhaps in this work it does not have as much weight as in Change their idea or in Front linebut it is there in two planes: that of fiction and that of its narrative construction.
At this point, I believe that the trajectory of Aixa de la Cruz allows it to be considered a consolidated voice of our narrative. After Change their ideaseems to have found his voice (or his voices), his way of narrating, although here mixes it with a somewhat more experimental narrative technique. I can, therefore, wait now with impatience what will be the next step of this author, either in the same line of its two previous novels, or with a new radical rudder that opens a new stage. We will have to wait until your next work to check.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2025/07/aixa-de-la-cruz-todo-empieza-con-la.html
