we are at once conscious of the unspeakable absurdities of life

With the first chapter of the book we are at once conscious of the unspeakable absurdities of life, of a thumping rhythm of isolation carrying its beat across desolate roads, into unsolved conflicts, and through crowds of unknown faces, leading us towards some sort of brighter establishment of purpose towards which the trajectory of our lives are directed. And right there, we see it: the decrepit apartment, nestled among fragments of bleak furniture and broken bulbs of light, the centerpiece of a central core which is the core of the character’s heart and life — heart, for the fluttering scales of emotion illuminated by haze memories, and life, for the breathing agency of reflections setting together into the narrative guiding our thoughts. There is an inexplicit and underlying search for meaning which subtly pervades the text. Andrea has arrived in Barcelona for the purpose of being a student of literature. Through this convoluted mass of solitude, familial violence, and existential uncertainty, her goal lies before her, gleaming in substance, and yet as immaterial as a product of her own abstract aspirations. But it is a frightening world, as well as a violent one, and she navigates this environment by means of both solitary rumination and the company of others.

Death, love, yearning, memory, heartbreak, irrational fever-dreams and unexpected revelations — it is as if all such literary fiction books touch upon the same themes: the inner chaos of the human condition. Andrea’s reflections upon seeing the sky on page 283, in contrast to her state of physical agony — it reminded me terribly of a passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (one of the most beautiful novels in history, in my opinion), when Prince Andrei’s close and unspeakably painful encounter with death on the battlefield causes him to look up at the sky, and to see in it this inexplicable beauty, this feeling of reality in its entirety commingling into nothing other than the mere seed of his own awareness, flashing under the intolerable pain of his injury, and yet glowing with an awareness of there lingering, somewhere out there, a sense of things being divine and perpetually higher than his own mortal self.

There is something particularly remarkable in the extent to which Andrea’s experiences, private feelings, and subjective perceptions are universalized by being portrayed through her state of being as a university student, and the air of vague familiarity that she imposes upon the absurd, foreign atmosphere permeating the narrative of the text. Her individuality is remarkable. There is quarrelling all about, troubling her and intervening with her privacy, and yet this seems only to further emphasize her solitude, not to detract from it. The ghostly, soft delineation of her rudimentary character contrasts with the rough outlines of the setting, the dismal nature of familial quarrels, and the blunt personalities of those around her.

The contrast between Ena’s cheerfulness, freedom of thought, resplendent character and light-hearted composure and Andrea’s tendency for being withdrawn and introspective. Andrea’s bitterness, need for isolation, and tendency for disliking people creates an interesting contrast when viewed in light of Ena’s character, and this contrast provides more significance to her solitariness, her inability to feel at ease with the world around her. However, I believe, on the whole, that Andrea is somewhat of an ordinary person. She is no genius, no troubled artist, no politically significant figure, but rather an ordinary individual, and it is this ordinariness that provides a certain level of universality to the text. I don’t particularly like her nor dislike her. I am surprised, however, of her general lack of resistance towards certain rivalrous affairs, such as Juan’s constant acts of violence towards Gloria — for someone with a tendency for percipience and ‘feeling things deeply’, her passiveness towards the bitter, violent quarrels happening at home is remarkable, because I would have reacted in an entirely different way. Andrea’s character, and her isolationist tendencies, raises certain questions — is it she and she alone who experiences these hallucinatory epiphanies and deep observances of life? Are such feelings ‘ordinary’, does everyone else experience them as well? We are never fully presented with the perspective of others, but only that of her own, and this unknowingness is to me like the blank edges of a map that we fail to fully explore.

There was a sentence towards the end of the book, which went something along the lines of “perhaps the most painful secrets that we keep guarded within us are the ones that others know the most well about” — this is a touching phrase. This struck me, in quite a significant manner, because it is a simple possibility that I have yet not previously conceived of. Ant is a possibility that is both frightening and comforting at once.

There are moments — brief, but distinctive moments in this novel, when a philosophical overture emanates from the text, and makes the reader shudder in their seat, as if confronted with the vague vision of a sensorial awakening, like a memory, softening the significance all other nearby occurrences, and bringing out the alluring depths of the soul. On page 207 I feel here the faint stirring of an unconscious awakening, of an imperceptible philosophy emerging from the depths of the human psyche. And I am at once reminded that life is sad; that loneliness is universal; that beneath all the glories and trivialities of daily life is beating heart of isolation, subject to its own moody despairs. Is loneliness truly universal?