Three narrators for a new time
Persecuted, underestimated, and, even today, marginalized: Mallorcan narrative has not always had its continuity guaranteed. Because although we have counted on a continuum of authors who have cultivated our poetry, narrative has experienced more worrying intermittencies. After the disruption of the Civil War, the already precarious narrative of the early 20th century found a notable recovery in the postwar authors, and lived its definitive explosion with the Generation of the Seventies. Authors such as Antònia Vicens, Guillem Frontera, Maria Antònia Oliver, Biel Mesquida, and Gabriel Janer Manila made it clear what was not entirely evident at the time: that Mallorca was a land of poets… And also of narrators. Now, the irruption of three young voices reinforces this path, maintained by dozens of authors now consolidated such as Sebastià Alzamora, Neus Canyelles, Melcior Comes, and Sebastià Perelló.
The newest voice is that of the Felanitx native Olívia Lund (2002), who with Corcs (Nova Editorial Moll), makes it very clear that literary maturity does not always have to do with age. In this first title, Lund immerses the reader in a lyrical torrent full of life regarding the weight of inheritances: the sanguine, the emotional, the cultural… And she does so through a writing style that excels in the combination of different temporal planes. She weaves a proudly worm-eaten, partial tapestry, based on a lineage of women. The treatment of the language, on the dialectal level, but also on the creative one, is among the best I have read in recent years, and the narration moves without hesitation, and with a disturbing grace, from the most psychological voice to the folk tale, from costumbrismo to surrealist explosion.
Another resounding irruption was that of Aina Fullana (Manacor, 1997) with Els dies bons (2021), which received several awards for published work and a great reader reception. Now, Fullana returns with De gran vull ser una casa (Bromera), a novel that takes the form of a deliberately fragmentary, subjectivized diary to talk about the notion of home. What does it mean to feel or not feel sheltered? What does it imply to have or not have a “place of one's own”? Can we people also be home? Are we still in time to look at Mallorca and say “our home”? A very sharp, sensitive, and intelligent book that does not shy away from the great discomforts of our time, with a deliciously complex gaze.
Laura Gost (sa Pobla, 1993) is not, by any means, a young promise, but a happy reality. With El preu de néixer (Proa), the author takes a step forward in her exploration of the blind spots of the human soul and proposes an authentic page-turner bioethical novel. A dystopia in which, for new children to be born, some living people must die to give them their place. A distorted mirror that portrays the society in which we live, that of surrogacy, that of the obsession with parenting, that of the pressure on women to have children. Very fluid dialogues and a highly worked-out plot do the rest.
Who would renounce the privilege of reading them?
