Died at the age of 39 due to sudden death, Camila Cañeque will never be able to see her first book published The last sentence (The Broken Nail, 2024), a beautiful and very personal philosophical, but also artistic and humorous reflection, on the end of things, whether they are books, the lives of individuals or the world in general.
In a way, his premature death on February 14 has given a definitive artistic meaning to the work that is now published and that Cañeque will never see in bookstores. As if she, above all a conceptual artist with great mastery of performance, had put the culmination of the project with one last action of the extreme cut that she liked so much during her life.
But beyond the dramatic disappearance of an artist with so much potential and talent, The last sentence It acquires its own value for being, as the thinker and essayist Eloy Fernández Porta assures in the presentation of the book, “an experience that surpasses literature to mix with art.” In this way Porta wants to define the game that Cañeque develops in the work between his voice and the different final phrases of the 452 novels that appear cited.
An artistic, poetic and philosophical fabric
Formally The last sentence It is a combination of paragraphs of the author’s own text with others created from different “last sentences” of novels read by her, with which she sometimes attempts to create a parallel narrative by placing them consecutively, but at other times she also seeks to provide an alternative continuity. to his reflections, as if he used samplers to give them a sound dimension, a practice widely used in radio.
From then on, nothing is formal in the book. As Carlos Rod, its editor, points out, “we received the proposal to put the back cover of the book in front and the cover at the end, so that the title would remain as the last sentence; It made me very worried, but Camila loved it, so we accepted it.”
That is The last sentence It is presented on its back cover, an artifice that does not continue on the interior pages, which are structured in their logical order, but which achieves an aesthetic game that already announces that we are facing a different book, which will play from the beginning with the misunderstandings that the author’s proposals may cause in our minds.
On the other hand, The last sentence It is a duel of voices, perhaps an impossible conversation between the two that weave together an artistic, poetic and philosophical fabric. The first voice, but not necessarily the main one, is the one structured by the artist’s mind, the one that develops her thinking between the different facets of the end of things. As the philosopher Rafael Agullol points out, “Camila consecutively braids three different but related endings: that of the artist’s work, that of the individual as a living and conscious being, and that of the world in a generic way.”
The importance of the ending as the heart of every literary adventure
Thus, Cañeque tells us about the artist’s fear of the end of the creative process and the consequent emptiness, but also about the difficulty of finding the appropriate phrase that closes all literary history and that in its translation to art, Porta defines as “the last brushstroke.” ”. Cañeque claims the importance of this last phrase as definitive so that the work as a whole, and by extension all types of vital processes, acquire meaning.
It does not matter if it is a sad, happy or enigmatic ending – as the author quotes in the book, Orson Welles said that the type of ending chosen depended only on the moment in which you decided to conclude the plot – the fundamental thing is that the ending must be coherent with what was previously written and above all it must be at par with the rest of the text. Hence the great and overwhelming responsibility of formulating this last sentence.
To demonstrate the solemnity that weighs on every concluding phrase, the artist offers us these last 452 phrases and classifies them in the text written by her, adding examples of each typology, but she also uses them to, as has already been said, give a artistic and sonorous dimension to his own words.
Humor as a philosophical tool
A dimension that is also humorous, because humor is a fundamental part of this book, a humor as full of delicate irony as it is of a deep philosophical charge. Thus, for example, Cañeque writes: “During the month of August 2010, I decided to spend my vacation in the departure terminal of Barcelona airport.” He associates the last sentence of Nicolás Gogol’s story with this text. Nose: “Don’t say who or what, but episodes like this happen in the world, rarely but they happen.”
Surely the author seeks to laugh at herself and her crazy intention: to spend August in an airport during the overwhelming August in Barcelona when everyone is at the beach or the pool. Curiously, Agullol relates that she met Camila Cañeque when she came to tell him at the university about her intention to “do field work in the departure terminal on the different ways in which people said goodbye when embarking on a trip.”
The philosopher highlights that he did not speak many more times with the artist, but that “at that time, in 2010, she already had this book in her head, because she told me about doing something that would link the last sentences of books, not only of novels, but also essays.” Agullol acknowledges that “it seemed like a wonderful idea to me, that it could be very fruitful and that it was directed at one of the hearts of literary creation itself, which is the end.”
The thinker also highlights as a discovery by Cañeque that the typology of the most used last sentence is that of the watery ending: “According to Camila, most books end with rain, and if it is not with rain, it is with water or with an aqueous medium. For the philosopher “it is as if this meant that the end leads to the origin, that it carries within itself the beginning implicit in a circle that includes a return to the matrix.”
An artist always on the run
“Since I met her, I had an image of Camila as someone who is marching, someone who was on the exit ramp,” observes Eloy Fernández Porta regarding her relationship with her former student at the college. He highlights that “at the age of 28 she had already made a surprising number of trips and had an impressive reading record”, which would largely explain the list of last phrases chosen for her work, all closing works of enormous quality. .
He explains that on one occasion, when Cañeque was a philosophy student, the artist expressed her desire to leave the university to move to Madrid, which she finally did until her return to Barcelona years later. And she adds that she also communicated to him, like Agullol, her intention to write The last sentence, although it arrived to Porta by mail and with a text already prepared. “On December 22, 2022, I received an email in which Camila told me that she had written some texts that she wanted me to read if she had time.” Porta assures that the text was a previous version of what is finally the book.
Regarding the work, the essayist highlights that it is “a very powerful book, which breaks the barriers that separate literature from art, two scenes that are often too isolated or that are viewed from a distance and with suspicion.” Thus, he highlights that in the last part of Cañeque’s career, “who acquired just fame as a conceptual artist,” literature crossed paths, which she incorporated into her activity, giving rise to what Porta calls “conceptual literature.”
It is a very powerful book, which breaks the barriers that separate literature from art, two scenes that are often too isolated or that are viewed from a distance and suspicion.
“What I say can certainly be seen in the The last sentencewith these more than 400 endings of novel texts separated, assembled, spliced and retold”, he adds regarding the term he has created and adds: “so that they form an ending that never ends, a feeling of a sustained ending, perhaps the longest that has ever been in our literature, since it lasts more than one hundred pages.”
Finally Agullol emphasizes The last sentence “this kind of complex approach to the topic of time, which is very beautiful because not only is there tear, but there is also a very interesting note about fiction, about how it constitutes a kind of revenge that human beings have against the transience of time” . Agullol also highlights the “deep philosophical maturity” of the artist, as well as “the great love for life that, despite the subject matter, the book exudes.”
As an example of what was expressed by both mentors, serve this fragment from Cañeque: “I wonder. Did you want endings? Well, take finals. I’m in a final landscape, trying to finish a project on the finish. I think about what has brought me to this, what has attracted me so much for so long. Now I feel something close to terror, like a magnifying mirror that enhances everything.” As a contrast to this text full of vertigo and dramatic tension, the author proposes the phrase that closes the novel The threshold of the night by Stephen King: “While you wait, watch TV and drink lots of water.” Without a doubt a wise choice because its author is a genius of tension and extreme suspense, but also because it ironically reflects what is the vital monotony of many human beings as the day approaches when they will utter their last sentence.
