2023-11-07 21:55:19
BarcelonaMarriages and infidelities. Promising children and disappointing children. The construction of new hotels and three-story villas in front of the sea. All this and much more appears in Ashes in the pool, the novel with which Laura Gost (Sa Pobla, 1993) won the 5th Proa prize, endowed with 40,000 euros. “The small world in which the characters live is the excuse for the author to subject them to acid and sometimes sarcastic pressure, but always fun”, said Xavier Pla, spokesman for the jury of the award, on Tuesday, shortly before it took place public during a dinner at Macba. The ironic look is one of the distinguishing features of the Mallorcan author, who in this case focuses on a family from Sa Pobla inspired by hers that makes a fortune thanks to the hotel business.
“There are many writers who have written about the impact of tourism, from Antonia Vicens to Guillem Frontera, Llucia Ramis, Melcior Comes and Pere Antoni Pons, and they have all done a very good job – acknowledges Gost. That’s why what I’m interested in exploring is what effects social transformations have on the intimacy of the characters.”
“The conception of this novel is inseparable from a personal fact, and that is that at the beginning of this year my two grandparents died. At the end of last year I started writing the book being very aware that the his disappearance would be imminent”, admitted the author, who despite being only thirty years old has already signed two more novels, written three plays and won a Goya award for the short film Woody & Woody (2018), about Woody Allen. From the director of Manhattan has inherited, for example, his sense of humor, which sparkles in the rapid and effective dialogue of the characters, in a similar way also to that of Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations between friends (2017).
Ashes in the pool is a choral novel structured around the figure of the patriarch, Sebastià, a character that allows Gost to trace a narrative arc that starts in the decade of the 50s of the 20th century and reaches almost the present day. “Sebastià is inspired by my grandfather on his father’s side, and he starts working in the fields, then becomes a builder, earns a lot of money in the hotel sector and also ends up losing it,” he explains. Ambition, wealth and later debts end up tearing the family apart. “Especially, his three wives, who represent three ways of loving,” Gost continues. The first is Catalina, with whom Sebastià will have two children and whom he met before succeeding. The second, Mercedes, is “younger, sensual and contradictory” and loves “the man he could still be”. Leidi, the last of them, loves “the man who will never be”.
A good recipe for digesting life
The novel condenses in just over 200 pages three generations of a Mallorcan family, the last of which is represented by one of the granddaughters, Laura, who shares the author’s name and look. “She is curious to understand the reasons for some of the actions taken by people who love each other. Fiction allows us not to necessarily judge the characters, but to try to understand them,” explains Gost, who for years has thought that “irony makes life more digestible”. That’s why he considers it his “favorite language after Catalan”. And he adds: “Humour is a good antidote against some excesses of solemnity.”
Ashes in the poolwhich goes on sale November 15, is full of pop references, including Winona Ryder, Kim Novak of Vertigo and at Maria Schneider de The last tango in Paris. Laura Gost published her first novel in 2019, The big kitchento Lleonard Muntaner, and three years later the second arrived, The world becomes simple (Empurias). “The first one was a bit of a naive story and with the second one there was a very important emotional involvement,” he recalls. Now, to Ashes in the pool, uses the intimate and familiar world of Sa Pobla, Alcúdia and the port of Pollença to construct a story that takes place in Mallorca, but which explains social transformations similar to those in many other places in the Mediterranean. “There are episodes with a real basis, but fiction is my honest way of relating to them – he admits -. In this sense, there is a sentence from Stephen King which I have very much in mind and which says: “When we write about the past, we always do so from the point of fiction”.
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