Her youth (29 years old) combined with her literary ambition (800 pages full of erudition, formal experimentation and a variety of settings, genres and narrative resources) have made the writer and philosopher Sara Barquinero the most praised or reviled novelist, as the case may be, on the current Spanish literary scene. Her novel has caused a stir and generated a debate that has not been seen since, I don’t know, Ana Iris Simón’s ‘Feria’, although her case was more for political than literary reasons?
‘Los escorpiones’ (Lumen) is a novel that readers are coming to in different ways. The biggest fans of postmodern literature because of the promises of finding that mix of Foster Wallace, Bolaño, DeLillo, Mariana Enríquez… that the publisher’s promotional phrases assure (a bit like this year’s ‘Fortuna’, so to speak). The most geeky, because of the whole gamer, creepypasta and conspiracy universe that the author recreates with a lot of talent and knowledge of the subject (the many hours accumulated of playing and browsing forums and Reddit threads are noticeable). And the youngest, attracted by all that generational angst that Sara (also, according to her statement, from experience) pours into her novel like the most desperate of the emo songs that appear in it.
‘The Scorpions’ is divided into five parts and three interludes. The first, titled like an executable, ‘Cambiatuvida.exe’, and starring an alter ego of the author herself, is a marvel. An investigation into the nooks and crannies of the Internet, online relationships and conspiracy theories that is as addictive as the most addictive of video games and disturbs like a suicide note. The second, ‘The Mexican Dog’, is a rural horror story, a mix of Palahniuk and King, starring a musician in the midst of a creative and existential crisis, which works very well as a postmodern exercise in psychological terror and a chronicle of a horse’s depression.
After these two parts and an interlude, also great, we have already swallowed up some 300 pages. It is at this point that the writer of this article started to get heavy-handed and recommend the book to everyone, “the best novel of the year.” The Curse of the Impatient Prescriber: the third part, a kind of historical-romantic novel written in diary form and set in Italy during the rise of fascism, seemed to me a disappointing detour. I didn’t find it very interesting as a digressive story or very meaningful as part of the whole.
With my nose a little twisted, I continued reading the rest of the book. The fourth part is a mix of crime and coming-of-age novel, set on a university campus in New Orleans in the 1970s. It is the most classic of the five parts. A story with echoes of Salinger and film noir, with a naive young man and the gangster’s girl, quite entertaining although a little trite. The last part, titled like the book, ‘The Scorpions’, returns to the protagonists of the beginning. It is a wild downhill, where plots, characters and obsessions converge, in a conclusion that resumes the pulse of the first two parts but that seemed a bit long to me.
In the end, the feeling that remains is that of being faced with an uneven novel, which goes from more to less, but which has brilliant moments. A whole literary experience, formally, structurally and narratively exuberant, which addresses in an extraordinary way themes such as addictions, existential anguish, suicide or the construction of parallel and/or conspiratorial realities as refuges to alleviate that vital emptiness, emotional hideouts to avoid ending up committing suicide.
