Carnality, viscosity and death

In 2021, this debut novel by the Catalan poet Pol Guasch made him, at twenty-three, the youngest-ever winner of the Llibres Anagrama de Novel·la prize. But there is nothing in Napalm in the Heart that evokes youthful optimism. Guasch’s prose mirrors his poetry in some ways. Just as sentiment, utterance and moment are out of step in his collection La part del foc (2022), so Napalm in the Heart is formed of mutually illuminating and undermining fragments, cast backwards and forwards in time. Here they cohere into a nightmare world of colonial oppression, minority exclusion and environmental doom, faintly recognizable as our own despite the indeterminacy of time and place. Sensuously (if sometimes inexactly) rendered in Mara Faye Lethem’s English, everything comes through the nature-dominated consciousness of a nameless rural adolescent with no worldly experience but of boundless sensibility, who exists in a state of wondering incomprehension: “I understand [things] even less, covered as they are by the snow of an implacable winter, but even when the sun comes out and the flowers bloom, and the snow melts … I still don’t understand a thing”.

Part I describes the suffocating rage of life under military occupation by men who speak a different language, which they attempt to impose (partly, of course, alluding to Catalan independence, but the allegory is universal). After a mysterious explosion at the equally mysterious “Factory”, the tanks roll in and most of the neighbours flee. The boy’s past traumas with damaged parents and homophobic schoolmates emerge in searing vignettes reminiscent of Édouard Louis. The scrambled chronology allows such bursts of mingled memory, perception and speculation to keep different possible realities in play until clarity comes (or doesn’t). In the apparent present, the boy saws up his dead grandfather to fertilize the vegetable plot; he writes to his lover, Boris, who may be the last inhabitant of the nearby city, now a ruin; he obeys Boris’s instructions to kill, very horribly, the invader who is courting his widowed mother. (In a deathbed letter she will admit to having originally belonged to the invader people.) Part II describes the lovers’ escape: a terrifying road trip to an uncertain destination, like a heightened metaphor of leaving childhood behind for the wider world – in this case with Mother decomposing on the back seat of the car.

The bare facts are ghoulishly extreme, yet disbelief is suspended as in a fairy tale. A powerful strangeness muffles the violence in this lost soul’s quest to understand the messages of memory and the workings of a time that folds past and future into one another, in the same way as innocence and guilt, cold and heat, human and animal merge and separate in a fluid dance; the debt to Clarice Lispector, implicit throughout, is at one point specific. The grotesque acquires peculiar beauty thanks to the narrowness of the imagery, restricted to evocations of carnality and death: viscosity, sickly phosphorescence and greedy voids, juxtaposed with a matter-of-factness that makes horror ordinary.

My mother falls off the back seat, onto the muddy mats, her arm twisted like the inverted leg of a hen … Our conversation enters her flesh; that light, beneath the trees, Boris’s voice, calmer than ever before. Her arm brushes my back. I touch her skin and the texture of its surface is plastic – like when we found my granddad’s dog in the garden, dead for days, and I sank my fingers into its flesh made of modelling clay.

The mother’s body will eventually be fed to a tankful of monstrous fish. No true peace can be made with her. Only one thing is clear to the narrator: his absolute faith in physical love and in Boris, expressed in his letters with heartbreaking simplicity (“I miss you every minute”) – though when the two are together communication falters. As a substitute for words, Boris takes photographs (in the spirit of Roland Barthes, it is hinted; some are included). For all the boy’s adoration of him, Boris comes across as secretive and cold; worse, he may simply be pursuing instructions left by his own murdered parents, rather than the dream of ordinary happiness that he has affected to share. Is the boy to face the post-apocalyptic deserts alone? The novel ends with photos of a rocky coast progressively overwhelmed by a wave.

Lorna Scott Fox is a journalist, editor and translator

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