I need wings to fly

With his first film (The 400 Blows), François Truffaut began a cinematic cycle starring a fictional character (Antoine Doinel, alter ego of Truffaut himself) who embodied different films, always played by the same actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud). From this filmed continuum, the beloved French filmmaker was able to explore the complex and exciting paths of a human being's life. I thought of this artistic example while reading Pere Joan Martorell's new and ambitious novel, Nits sense ales (Nights without wings) from Pagès Editors, as through its pages we can once again encounter a character who has starred in other works by the Lloseta writer, such as the Llibre de les revelacions (Book of Revelations) (Editorial Moll, 2007), because Amador is, in effect, Martorell's correspondent in possible parallel and quantum universes. In a literary adventure that connects him with Solenoide, by Mircea Cărtărescu, Pere Joan Martorell does not recreate his life in the mirror of fiction, but reinvents it from turning points that could have occurred, and thus recovers Amador, a psychologist and writer in a center dedicated to behavioral disorders. But every story begins with a turning point, that is, with a change, a disorder, and it is here when the appearance of Judith, a young woman marked by a past of brutal violence and abuse, activates a narrative mechanism of high emotional tension. Her voice, which emerges with difficulty between shame and urgency, challenges the therapist and destabilizes him to the point of forcing him to confront his own limits. It is then that the work unfolds like a progressive infernal descent towards the most opaque zones of the mind and society, with a highly symbolic language and images of powerful impact. The world that is drawn around the characters, with the presence of a sordid network of domination and exploitation, is not merely a setting that draws from a real case: it acts as an amplifier of internal conflicts. But what truly sustains the novel is its formidable ability to show how evils are not only external, but above all intimate, embedded in memory and the body. Martorell develops a story that skillfully moves through the margins of moral ambiguity, exploring the fine line that separates compassion from desire.With a ductile and intensely expressive prose, which knows how to alternate sharp cuts with moments of restorative delicacy, Nits sense ales, by Pere Joan Martorell, is a striking account of vulnerability and the search for redemption, a novel that delves without concessions into the most fragile and uncomfortable territories of human experience, where wound and desire are confused and where the need for empathy becomes almost a matter of survival.