The great Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia He once commented, in one of his lectures, that one of the most common plots in contemporary fiction was the following: “a man loses a woman and invents a conspiracy.” Consciously or not, the very young Sara Barquinero (Zaragoza, 1994) starts from this premise, inverting it. The protagonist, a twenty-something also named Sara, has met for the first time with a man, Javier, who she met on an app, something that millions of strangers do every day, all over the world. However, he does not appear and when she investigates a little (he is a misplaced person, with a present in ruins and a nebulous future, the Internet conversations with that stranger supported his life to a certain extent) she discovers that he has died. . He has committed suicide. Suddenly, instead of the longed-for romantic encounter, she finds herself faced with an invitation to a funeral. If we know anything at this point, it is that there is nothing more dangerous than a desperate individual, with nothing to lose; and Sara has very little to lose, so she becomes obsessed, she tries to find an explanation for her death.
Obsession is a major theme in this book. Yeah “The Infinite Jest” of David Foster Wallace It was a great novel about addiction – about the dangers of the idea of immediate gratification, of infinite entertainment. “Scorpions” It is a novel about obsession. Its two protagonists, Sara and Thomas (whom we meet a little later) are two characters who are still young, but they are burned out; have discovered that, as Foster Wallace guessed, behind the great promise of social networks, absolute connectivity and technological gadgets, there is only a chasm of anxiety and insomnia, loneliness and neuroses. So the two are two ideal detectives: better to set out after a mystery than to face the demolished state of their existence. They unconsciously reproduce a widespread phenomenon that explains why conspiracy theories are now more popular than ever, whether in literature and cinema or in the forums and communities that proliferate online about chemtrails, 9/11, pizzagate or vaccines. They all come to the same conclusion: if we feel so tired and dissatisfied, it is because someone is deceiving us.
Thomas and Sara discover, in effect, a vast conspiracy, like the characters in Borges either Echo They glimpse “the secret of the world”, but they access it through means that are rigorously contemporary: the Deep Web, creepypasta, urban legends about cursed video games like the chimerical Polybius and songs that can induce suicide. . The author adds a historical context, she takes us – in the best pages of the novel – to Italy in which, after World War I, fascism emerged (amid a lot of fatigue and dissatisfaction). It was then that we noticed, for the first time, that an era of great technological advance can be accompanied by an invasion of the irrational, of obscurantism, of barbarism; that, in reality, there is no opposition between the two things. This part of the book reminds us in particular of one of the greatest writers who turned conspiratorial obsession into a matter of high literature: the Thomas Pynchon of “V” and “The rainbow of gravity”.
“Scorpions” It is one of the best novels that has been published so far in the 21st century. It belongs to a rare lineage of monster novels, those in which a writer disguises himself as a demiurge and, starting from a more or less recognizable reality, creates an autonomous universe, with its own rules, enigmas and cosmogony. Very few books have been written in Spanish in the last twenty-four years with such aspirations: “2666”, without a doubt, is the first that comes to our mind; and perhaps it should also be mentioned “Your face tomorrow” of Javier Marias and “Our part of the night” of Mariana Enriquez. Of course, that the author wrote such a hugely ambitious and brave (and largely accomplished) book at her age makes it all a little more astonishing.
