Melancholy of resistance

Since I've dedicated 2025 to others—especially Josep M. Llompart, Iris Murdoch, and Pier Paolo Pasolini—I've had to turn to powerful personal passions to recharge. The one that has given me the most satisfaction lately has been returning to one of my favorite film directors: the legendary Jess Franco. His films are libertarian works of art, so destructive of conventions that they achieve a secular anarchism. Watching a radical creator do whatever his holy desires dictate is inspiring and regenerative. I've wondered if it would be possible to write a novel as wild as his films.

Imagine a writer soiling page after page with ink, sweat, tears, semen, and excrement. Imagine them demonstrating the gift of capturing the characteristics of a claustrophobic island environment through the style of the Dirty Realism school or the Angry Young Men. Imagine them capable of reincarnating the spirit of Charles Bukowski, unleashing the verbal inventiveness of William S. Burroughs, and expanding the adjacent abysses of Jordi Cussà. Imagine them unleashing a tsunami of explicit and spot-on references to popular culture, from the brilliant Nintendo video games to Voldemort and SpongeBob SquarePants. And finally, imagine them taking William Blake's maxim, who proclaimed that Exuberance is Beauty, to its most dazzling and powerful consequences. Well, I recently learned that there's no need to imagine so much because this novel exists, can be bought, and can be devoured with eagerness and fervor. Titled "Door." The closed sea And it's a real Molotov cocktail from the baker Cheque Pons Sans that saw the light thanks to Llentrisca edicions.

Although it plays with, and even parodies, the foundations of autofiction, it's not a shared fantasy. It's more of an unbridled declaration. The protagonist is Martí, a character trapped in a suffocating atmosphere that drowns him under layers of frustration and impotence. Like Pessoa, he has all the dreams in the world, but he possesses neither willpower nor any strategic ability. This leads him to live in a daily hell steeped in dark desires that find some solace only in disturbing acts, which are confirmed as pathetic revolts that reveal the Great Comedy that surrounds us, full of hypocrisies and seemingly unquestionable social commandments. The best fragments are morbid peaks imbued with a critical spirit and a caustic irony that, in most instances, culminates in extreme black humor, confronting us with the strict and implacable melancholy of 21st-century resistance. The closed sea, If Cheque Pons Sans were a film, Martí would surely be played by the most hysterical Klaus Kinski, one of the actors who most boosted the Jess bowl.