Journal of the disappointment, by Paul Gutierrez

The third novel of the author andalusian abounds in the idea of bankruptcy generational and discouragement in an environment pos 15M.

If there is an available literature which, in the same hit dice, you add temperament, generational and disenchantment pos 15M, Paul Gutierrez (Huelva, 1978) is one of the expedition leaders. Your writing, spread over three novels and a book of stories, becomes a site in a political dimension and social of the narrative space. Where converges a generation and a half is defined by a symptom of tort common, stoked by the crisis, and different authors and authors who work from a shared approach: the need to redefine an identity, a country, a productive model. Something that, also, has a vast tradition as mortar literary.

severed Heads is the latest proposal narrative of Paul Gutierrez and is in that coordinate. That is to say, an artifact that presents as a patent from oblivion. As a relocation of the poetry of the ignored. As a damage led to the fiction of the forms of vitality and the wear and tear of the advertising of a secured future for those who espigaron in the 90’s. In Spain. In cities and towns of horizon sealed after the peep show of money and corruption.

This novel is a diary and it is a guillotine that is constructed as a grievance and a dispute. Also as a slow degeneration, which at times can be naive and at other times it is voracious in its damage. The damage (and confusion) is the engine of explosion of the protagonist: a treintañera in exile in London in search of opportunities (nothing new), subjected to the rigours of the precarious (nothing exceptional), sharing a flat, in a shed in suburban marginal dominated by islamism (old picture), dedicated to justify and feed his disgust and secure it in a journal. Severed heads sounds like a road movie by a handful of streets. The wandering of a worker precarious that makes his autobiography stuck in the fertile observatory of a generation that tries raised.

The journal of the treintañera Mary (girl’s name) is something more than a record of incidents: it is a sampler of disappointments where they have no room for the joy or dignity. All bet to the confusion and excess. But those pages (a booklet of 50 pence) enclose force not by what they say, but by the construction of what is said. From the speech something kneading against the Church (“catholicism in The mediterranean was built on suspicion,” he writes), sex as a damping of the tedium, the bisexuality as climbing from which to jump into the void, or that mixture of disappointment and dignity that formalizes the embarrassment. Also the conscience attacked a generation of evil premiered, and worse paid, the desire for redemption of the muslim brotherhood from a gender perspective and a naivety that in itself causes more distance, feminism, male violence, love as a class struggle, the loneliness, the joy of feeling it fall slowly and without a will to remedy it. The journal will derive as a letter of suicide, as a live set of accounts. Severed heads is a psalm of self-destruction that can be confused with nihilism. But it is only the account of a slackness, a slackness, a collision, a powerful indifference. It displays a realism with an overdose of reality compensated by a narrative that is consistent, with moments of enormous intensity and rigorous management of the phrasing of the order of a poetic, fascinating, almost to the point of run wild but good subject.

The collage of situations and their arrangement on the page, to the way of some poems of Ashbery, it also reinforces the novel. As well as the interest in listening to that people that has been left. The protagonist is, in part, spokesperson unexpected of a generation dominated by the disenchantment; and, in part, a window into a present that is certainly hostile. The democracy that generation rediscovers (from 15M) is predefined for a few manners in which they do not find space. They feel aggrieved by a lack of consideration and develop a complex antagonism of the bourgeois against his own condition, the bourgeoisie. And that generates an imposture vital, social, and narrative.

The work of Paul Gutierrez maintains a trend toward sociological here is driven by the most intimate places of writing: the diary, where one manages their privacy. Where the subject breaks out, exercising (allegedly) a maximum effort of alleged transparency.

will claim more light to the peripheries emotional (to the lateral spaces of the Story) is also part of the distinctive ring of the writer Paul Gutierrez. Because to write is to take a position in the world and rehearse a policy that is exercised in all directions, something that already was the subject of intervention in his novel Democracy (2012) and, in another way, in The books sudden (2015). Severed heads is something more than an exercise of language. It is put to dance the words in a spirit of fidelity to social and political respect to the time in which it is fixed. And the poetry that is generated is highly explosive at the best of times, but sometimes also slightly hiperventilada. The world of Mary comes to life in its enumerations, and is not restricted to hold nothing left but to attack and hurt with a sense of reality runnig. Where before there was caricature and sarcasm, Paul Gutierrez has installed a restlessness that combat the belief in a future drinking or a society perfectible.

this is Not exactly the recovery of No Future (theme punk of the 70’s), but the confirmation of a radical change of scenery for those young people who when the crisis began they had 20 years ago and still believed to be immortal, and are supported by the solstice of a future. Already never will be. And some, like Mary, to choose the sacrifice for opposition to the external. Your journal is just that. And this novel is his journal. The ideas and actions intended to change the world not more than three decades no longer make up the Story. They are real, and their reality should not be underestimated. But does not determine it. This generates a chronic disease: nostalgia. And against that also warns Heads cut off.

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