the writer Miquel de Palol closes the narrative cycle ‘Exercises on point of view’ with his ninth and last of the great novels, ‘Bootes’, which he defines as a “personal and collective introspection”. The book has been presented at Sincrotró Alba, in Cerdanyola del Vallès, a geometric representation that serves as inspiration to define what he calls the “city-machine”, which represents the result of contemporary capitalism. “The intention is to make you think, and if it can be revolting, my aspiration is that readers leave the book differently than they started it,” he explains. Editat per Navona, surt a la venda aquest dilluns en català i castellà, resultat d’un translation process parallel driven by the same author.
The author has created a novel following a geometric scheme which is common to him in his publications, in this case the Szilassi polyhedron, which has the particularity of having seven faces and each of them is in contact with the rest. Plus, it has a hole in the middle, “like a doughnut,” says de Palol.
The seven main participants in the book correspond to each of the stars that make up the Bootes constellation: Artur, Rakshasi, Midoissa, Bettina, Curwen, Sport and Mina.
The story centers on a building, a city-machine, with a structure very similar to a particle accelerator like the Alba Synchrotron, where the book was launched this Monday: “It has a central point and a corridor around , and history is a machine with a series of Chinese boxes, and inside the building is a society where there are games with the point of view, the ‘me’, and the ‘me’ is the center of the donut, which turns out to be a gap,” he explains.
In this sense, post-modern society appears in a “moment of delirium”, according to the author, which aims to be an account of the destruction of society. However, it contrasts the two machines, that of the book, damaged by itself, and that of the Synchrotron, designed for good and to generate knowledge.
“The book is the exercise of the point of view in which the transfer of the first person from one character to another is attempted to be the vehicle of the narrative, it is a personal and local collectivity introspection, and of that we can call ‘humanity'”, he points out. With this pretext, he wants to generate an internal movement, which helps the reader to think and position himself: “I am fine if they leave the book angry, and even thinking that I have no reason and that what I have written is a nonsense, and that I have a wrong view of the world.”
A society in the system
Miquel de Palol’s vision aims to analyze the exercise of powers in a society that, he believes, lives under a criterion similar to that of ancient Rome of ‘bread and circuses’. “In our society we don’t know who is in charge, the politicians are mere landlords, the real masters are somewhere else and we don’t know who they are,” he says.
“And the rich, who own big companies, seem to have someone behind them who commands more than they do,” he continues. Reminiscing on past times, where, without going any further, the French Revolution ended with the head of Louis XVI rolling down the Place de la Revolución, he says that these mechanisms to change society would no longer be viable today.
“In the 18th and 19th centuries we could guillotine the king, and now we can’t, among other things because it’s no use, because nobody’s head would actually be cut off,” he points out. “The atomization of the working classes is another factor that, prepared or a consequence of other things, makes it impossible to create an awareness and a collective project of revolt against the system”, he adds.
Miquel de Palol transfers this vision to the pages of this ninth novel of the narrative cycle, playing with the geometric concept in which each actor represents a face of the polyhedron to act in the process of changing reality.