It's said...

From Coses que et passen a Barcelona quan tens 30 anys (2008 – Things That Happen to You in Barcelona When You’re Thirty) through to Les possessions (The Possessions – winner of the 2018 Llibres Anagrama Prize) by way of the immense Tot allò que una tarda morí amb les bicicletes (2013 – Everything That One Afternoon Died with the Bicycles), Llucia Ramis (Palma, 1977) has been moving along the one of most fertile paths of contemporary autobiographical creation, namely that which jointly structures the story of her own life—not excluding the elements of fiction that are present in all experience-based narrative—with the story of another very close main character to whom she writes. The result is a paradoxical play of mirrors in which, through the gaze of the author/narrator/character who is reconstructing her life, the biographical reconstruction of other members of the family is given centre stage. The result is that Ramis’s life is interwoven with that of her grandparents and parents in a sort of oblique autobiography as she quests for a stock of family stories to preserve them from oblivion, while also striving to find sense in her genealogical inheritance, seeking to construct some perspective on the forms of relating with other generations, and trying to make room for herself in the family space. Ramis’s writing is always a journey of pursuing her lineage.

In Les possessions, the family elegy is mixed with the moral chronicle of the epoch and these two narrative lines are complemented with another that emerges from the past—that of her grandfather’s Madrid-based business partner who, in 1993, killed his family and then himself—and this part of the story explodes into the present of the narrator, as always happens when the corpse of a memory is exhumed because it then stirs up the reappearance of old ghosts.

Yet Les possessions is in no way a thriller, although there are moments when it seems that Ramis is an effective narrator of crime plots. Neither—fortunately—is it a sociological or generational tract of the time, even though Ramis widely scatters judicious hints of the nature and vices of the world she lives in. And neither is it a novel about family ties or sentimental attachment to partners, although the pages that irradiate compassion, vexation, melancholy, and pride regarding her people are replete with moving splendour. Les possessions is all of this but not exactly, thanks to the method of composition Ramis has chosen. It is as if she were setting up a silent dialogue with the reader, or as if she were writing more to silence than to speak.



Llucia Ramis does not limit herself to writing things down, with temporal logic and the pretensions of a memoir writer, or to “digging into my roots” as she says in the beginning of this book. Rather, she opts for non-chronological, fragmentary, disperse evocation as a technique to illustrate the dynamic landscape of her past life: experiences, backdrops, languages, thoughts, individuals, objects, smells, and conversations. Rubble, certainly, but beneath it we can discern the edifice it was but which is no longer there. Llucia Ramis, as a contemporary writer who is aware of her times, knows that the past as it occurred is irrecoverable because not even the mental constructions afforded by memory are valid. “Every time we remember something […] we are in fact recalling the last time we remembered it. We don’t go back to the moment when we lived it, but to another which was already a revisiting. We remember what we invented or what we were made to invent” (p. 177). Once this premise is accepted, the only possible way to channel the convergence of past experiences is literature, the tidying fiction that bestows the plus of authenticity needed for telling history and, moreover, embellishes the edges because “imagination reaches much further” (p. 172). Hence, the true organising element of this novel is the narrative voice, the tenuous golden thread that subtly rebinds the string of scenes comprising the story. Accordingly, this voice orders the life-baggage of the narrator and makes it comprehensible although, in the act of creating a narrative discourse of her own experience through language, she also engenders a new image of the main character, “reinventing her starting out from new data she didn’t know in order to discover the other things she didn’t know she knew, which is what always happens when we tell a story” (p. 13). It is no coincidence that the pages of Tot allò que una tarda morí amb les bicicletes (Everything That One Afternoon Died with the Bicycles) brim with thoughts about the creative capacity of fiction mingled with the narrator’s ponderings. In brief, this is what Lluís Muntada accurately described as the “demiurgic I of the narrator” (L’Avenç, Nº 393, September 2013).

Llucia Ramis knows how to play with the evocative power of details, aware that the compositional core of the work is precisely an accumulation of scenes giving significant depth to moments of childhood and adolescence, often invested with an almost epiphanic character: the televised explosion of the Challenger, the grotesque discovery of who the Three Wise Men of the East really were, the first sexual experience, squabbles with siblings, etcetera. There is no doubt that, in these passages, the reader finds the strengths of the book, so much so that the story of the young woman who has lost her job and goes back to live with her parents is diluted in favour of re-creation of life before she left the island.

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