Antonia, take up your cross

After a life devoted to writing prodigious narrative works, in the final period of her life, poems became—and only the most avid eyes could have foreseen this, since there were already poetic bones in her prose—her creative foundation, and in this way she ended up achieving well-deserved honors. This could be a portrait of Thomas Hardy, but it is also a portrait of the immense Antònia Vicens, who returns with her most radical, most sincere, and most perfect book: Take up your cross at LaBreu Edicions, a devoted publishing house that has brought to light the latest and supreme poetic volumes of the author, endowed with the gift of achieving maximum expressiveness through minimal expression.

There have been many people who have compared the style pitiless of Antonia Vicens with those of the most cruel Víctor Català, the most ruthless Mercè Rodoreda or the bloodiest Quentin Tarantino, although there are a thousand film directors who leave the person responsible for Reservoir Dogs ridiculous in their treatment of violence, from Dario Argento to Sam Peckinpah, Jess Franco, and Lloyd Kaufman. All these unconventional filmmakers could have made an adaptation faithful to the spirit ofTake up your cross, the wildest book by an author who doesn't mince words. Provocation? More like a very careful reflection on our world today, where wars are broadcast live and in 4K quality. Right now, in the Gaza Strip, Benjamin Netanyahu is leading an infamous genocide, and Ukraine continues to fight against that Russian tyrant named Vladimir Putin, to mention the most well-known atrocities currently underway. The planet is suffering, and Antonia Vicens, who like William Blake is capable of discerning the voices of the cosmos, x-rays this atrocious reality, resulting in her most apocalyptic work.

Take up your cross It is a vicious work in which children wander madly through a city full of executioners who build rows of corpses while birds of prey do their work and organ bargaining takes place under a sky drenched in kamikaze drones. Like Mircea Eliade, Vicens knows that the cross of Jesus on Golgotha is located right above where Adam's skull is buried, and human beings, in the absurd and disturbing cosmic disorder, always stumble over the same stone, the one Cain used to kill Abel. We are faced with a wise and merciless book that is a lesson in writing, but also an act of human courage, because describing the prevailing horror is perhaps one of the few dignities we have left in this unworthy universe. And Antonia Vicens takes responsibility for her mission: to take up her cross, to write, to make us shudder.