What is a mother capable of?

Many literary constructions are, in reality, the happy result of having managed to overcome technical challenges, that is to say, creative artifacts built upon hurdles that have enhanced, as the members of Oulipo always knew, know, and will know, the increasingly less secret motors of writing. The novel A Void, by Georges Perec, which we can enjoy in English thanks to the publisher Dalkey Archive Press with a masterful translation by Gilbert Adair, is one of the greatest examples of this: a fabulous story in which the author does not use any word that contains the letter E. No joke. However, let us not forget that forms as commonly used as sonnets or sestinas are, also, formal complications that invite us to overcome obstacles to convey the content we wish to express. 

The book that challenges us this week proposes a curious, ambitious, and complex textual choice. The result is, in effect, fascinating and stimulating, as it encourages us, as Roberto Bolaño proclaims, to seek new paths, new routes, new possibilities not yet even dreamed of. Today I want to talk about the novel titled Stabat Mater and the subtitle Un vent diví, by Òscar Palazón Ferré, a daring proposal that won the 2025 Mallorca Narrative Prize and has been released by Galés Edicions with the support of the Consell de Mallorca. The fact is that the new volume by the prolific and multi-award-winning Palazón imposes the basic, and essential, foundation of not interrupting the verbal torrent, nor the Joycean stream of consciousness, with paragraphs or periods, whether in-line or as new paragraphs: the entire novel is a single sentence that has the duration, hold on tight, of 200 pages.

More than one person will be afraid to face such a radical experiment. I do not want to deceive anyone: indeed it is, as is much of the work of a pioneering writer like Óscar Palazón Ferré, who has opened new paths within current Catalan literature and has not always received the attention or critical notice that he well deserves. However, at the other pole of this risky character –which is not usually to the taste of a general public that seems to want literature to be more and more like Netflix– there is a tremendous force such as tenderness and, in my opinion, this achieves a weight that balances the narratological scale. If the form is complex, the background is of the utmost delicacy: an investigation into motherhood based on the angelic and demonic figure at the same time, since it condenses all the spectra of humanity, of a mother who chats and who seems as if she can never stop. Brilliant. Then apparently real facts and others that are fictional –who can distinguish them entirely?– unfold alongside reflections on language and anecdotes of all kinds. In short: ‘Stabat Mater’, by Òscar Palazón Ferré, is a stimulating torrent that cannot be put down.