“‘The life of crabs’, by Pablo Solberg“It’s the book I always wanted to read,” he says. the musician Louta from the back cover of this new publication from the Mansalva publishing house. “The joy is double,” continues the artist, “because it is from a young man who lives in the same era as me. This novel is the spearhead of a new golden culture “That is born from the questions that we all have in our chests.” Why does Louta recommend this book with such emphasis?
The narrator of “The life of crabs (that young man that Louta mentions, the reader assumes) tells of his arrival in the Brazilian town of Picinguaba, where he is going to meet an old lover of his mother. Cordial, alcoholic, with a misanthropic life and yet inserted in the small fishing village, the host carries a past full of enigmas. With a calm, thorough and no less eloquent voice, the narrator also reveals his own afflictions and entanglements. Thus, one after another, the various plot layers that give meaning to the story unfold.
With a firm hand, the hero tells about the death of his mother when he was six years old. The story, of atrocious coldness, does not give rise to any type of compassion, and even allows for certain respites and a slight burst of humor, immediately dissipated. The Norwegian customs and festivities, which appear due to the narrator’s Nordic lineage, could relax the reader, but, on the other hand, they reinforce the dramatic tension of the plot.
Linked to the events after the mother’s death and a tortuous adolescence in Buenos Aires, the episodes from the past become interwoven with the tangled events that take place in the thickets of the island, under a morbid light and a dense, blackened climate. Despite taking place in Brazil, Solberg’s prose does not exude warmth, and if heat is referred to, it is only referred to in terms of suffocation.
Like those ancient photographers who retouched the dark circles of hysterical women with makeup to represent an illness that lacked visible features, Solberg presents his characters with spiritual depth and a “pathos typical of Greek tragedy. There is also a certain dose of literary dandyism, an implacable indifference that has something of “martial indolence, a singular mixture of placidity and audacity,” with which Baudelaire defined that category. That literary dandyism, the Proustian references to memory and the nature of time hover, with astonishing lucidity, in several of these pages. The narrator’s move to the apartment in which he had lived with his mother in his early childhood “was somewhat disappointing, since after all, no recollection emerged that was not already present. But something happened as he discovered the rooms and objects that I had forgotten (…) everything evoked intimacy, as if I had met old acquaintances whose names I did not remember or the places where I used to frequent them, but who, despite this, transmitted a familiar air to me. I trusted that a brief interaction would be enough to dust off my memory. Unfortunately, after a short time I had to recognize that if my intention was to illuminate the past and preserve it in its purest state, then settling there had been a mistake, because the possible memories that could be hidden in the apartment would be, like in a tape of cassette, rerecorded again and again, unintentionally but inexorably, with new experiences. After a few months, the house stopped referring me to my mother.”
Born in Buenos Aires, resident in Spain and son of a Chilean and a Norwegian, Solberg is a Rare avis in the Argentine literary landscape. Less related to “Metamorphosis” of Franz Kafka that with “The forest of the night by Djuna Barnes, “The life of crabs It appeals to an archaic language, of austere elegance. Theophile Gautier could have been referring to Solberg when he spoke of a style that he transcribed “the subtle confidences of neurosis, the depraved confessions of a withered passion, the bizarre hallucinations of the fixed idea that sinks into madness.”
Laura Ramos is a journalist and writer. Her latest book is “The Young Ladies” (Lumen).
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