The legacies that slumber within us

Corcs, by Olívia Lund at Nova Editorial Moll, is a singular literary irruption, a first novel that is far from early, which addresses memories, recollection, inheritance, and identity from a radically lively and imaginative perspective. Through the figure of Glòria, the protagonist, the author constructs a tangle of stories in which the different pasts are not closed-off or disconnected territories, but a single invisible and active presence that beats beneath the complex and chaotic present surface. The repeated gestures, obsessions, words, condemnations, and extravagances of previous generations emerge unexpectedly, as if every family construct were made of organic matter that never ceases to transform in the alchemy of metamorphoses. Lund turns latent legacies into a very powerful force that traverses bodies, spaces, and epochs, and suggests that what we consider intimately ours is often also the echo of many other existences that have preceded us, a philosophical precept that would fit with Nietzschean conceptions of eternal return.One of the novel's successes is the way it dissolves the boundaries between historical times, personal experiences, and individual or collective imaginaries. Tumultuous loves, disappointments, episodes of madness, family myths, and popular legends coexist in the same stream that advances with visionary energy made of furious gusts, furiously lyrical, steeped in Faulkner and Lispector, in Blai Bonet and Antònia Vicens. Far from any accommodating folklorism, Corcs opts for good folklore in a disturbing and complex exploration of narratological mechanisms, delving into the landscapes of delirium, unconscious transmissions, and psycho-emotional persistences that shape us. All this is sustained by a very expressive language, rooted in the land but at the same time extraordinarily flexible, capable of combining poetic density and narrative intensity with thoughtful depth. It is quite normal that the great Antònia Vicens praises this formidable debut.With this first published work, and with a few awards under her belt, Olívia Lund confirms literary ambition and her own voice: she knows how to dialogue with ultralocal and universal traditions without getting bogged down. Corcs is a novel that digs into the deepest layers of collectivity, into the secrets and genetic codes that all lineages preserve, to reveal their shadows, wounds, and wonders, and it does so with a formal audacity and imaginative power that turn the reading into an absorbing experience. Nova Editorial Moll thus incorporates into its catalog an author who seems destined to occupy a prominent place among the new voices of current and future Catalan literature.