When a universe is confirmed even bigger

Joan Miquel Oliver begins his literary comeback with a new literary work that confirms, amplifies, and enlarges his unique worldview of the world and the bubble: La vida no són matemàtiques at La Magrana. It is, in effect, a book that is difficult to categorize and, precisely for that reason, decidedly stimulating. More than a conventional succession of stories, the volume is built upon occurrences, anecdotes, intuitions, obsessions, discoveries, whims, jokes, pranks, and small epiphanies that unfold with an unbribable freedom. To say they are occurrences is, by no means, an objection: it is a way of stating and recognizing the singularity of a literature that does not need to submit to narrative conventions to end up being original. Oliver writes like someone opening unexpected windows to reality and letting in everything that usually remains off-camera. And in this highly personal universe, there can appear, with the same naturalness, the Alaska kiosk, the missed teacher Toni Artigues, Alexandra Schneider, and Jaume Ripoll, from Filmin, both turned into key pieces of a personal universe in which the daily, the absurd, the drift, and the revelation coexist with the joy of a festival.There is in this work a grace and a wit that are deeply Majorcan, but which Joan Miquel Oliver takes towards a space of his own, a kind of viticulture surrealism in which reality seems to have been slightly displaced from its usual axis. In this sense, the creative operation connects with that of Alice Rohrwacher, capable of capturing certain Italian essences without ever turning them into postcards. Oliver reaches similar milestones with Majorca and his beloved haunts: he gleans the absurdity, the chaos, the tenderness, the decadence, the bad temper, and he does so with the strange capacity to alchemically transform moth-eaten traditionalism into delicious delirium that has not been fully exploited until now. He also talks about films, songs, paintings, books, and life misfortunes that make up what could be the first step of an episodic autobiography.Perhaps the most interesting thing about La vida no són matemàtiques is that Joan Miquel Oliver does not limit himself to repeating the formulas we already know from his career: he expands his creative torrent and ventures towards an even more unpredictable, pioneering, and libertarian literature. Whoever reads it may be bewildered, evidently, because he does not always offer the usual coordinates of narratology or diarism, but this bewilderment is precisely a virtue: it forces one to abandon expectations, to let oneself be carried away, and to accept that literature can also consist of looking at the world from unsuspected angles. And this, in a headlong literature like ours, is a rarity that should be celebrated.