In a rugged, mountainous region of an imagined country, an accident occurs at a sinister industrial installation that turns night into day in a flash of irradiating light. The area becomes a militarised zone. Catalan writer Pol Guasch’s debut novel, translated into electrifying English by Mara Faye Lethem, begins 900 days after the incident. The unnamed young narrator is living with his mother and writing letters to his lover, Boris, whose replies we do not get to read. His abusive father has taken his own life, and his mother is in a relationship with one of the shaven-headed uniformed occupiers who speak her language, a different one from the narrator’s.
Napalm in the Heart is written as a mosaic of short pieces in different modes: memoir, letters, poetry, poetic prose, photographs (taken by Boris), which draw on different genres, including science fiction, adventure, horror and romance. These are skilfully composed, cohering into a lucent, compelling narrative that shares a sensibility and atmosphere with one of the greatest Catalan novels, Mercè Rodoreda’s tenebrous beauty Death in Spring.
The setting of Guasch’s novel is dislocated from time and place, but familiar from the devastation visited on civilians by war, now and in the past, including Spain’s civil conflict, and written in the shadows of a climate crisis that the future might be casting on the present. The book’s “affected zone” encompasses an emptied-out city, with a few stragglers eventually returning, including Boris, and a rugged upland with a depleted population living close by a forest. This has become primeval, with growths of “treacly flowers” and “mosquitoes the size of walnuts”, watchful beasts hiding behind the bushes.
Boris is a photographer, “always half-absent, like a photo, lurking on the cusp of another reality”, with an “eclipse always in his eyes”. They meet in a place they call the rat room, but Boris won’t discuss what has passed between them in their letters, or say very much at all without provocation. “Silence: his way of fleeing.” They “pound each other, clumsily, and bellow, deep, like wild creatures”. Theirs is a relationship of encounters but not, as the narrator comes to realise, one of memories. Passion and destruction run together, and love can save and destroy.
The narrator lives in a state of suspension, waiting in the wasteland for an escape out of or into life: “fleeing, a verb that doesn’t end”. He attends carefully to everything and everyone around him, both because it is dangerous and because he is seeking connection and meaning, but he is drifting, determined by others’ actions. The distance between the animal and the human has been closed. The characters struggle to reopen this gap, to move from surviving to living.
But brutality lies always in wait. As the narrator says: “Violence: runs across the length of our skin. Our skin: seamless, just a terrible memory of years of isolation, of a splintered language, of an exile at home … revolution does not begin at home, no, it begins in the body.” The dispossession of land and language are joined together, along with the sense that saving the language is crucial to saving love, memory and hope for a better future, what the narrator’s mother calls “a sense of eternity”.
The tanks leave and the narrator joins Boris in his derelict apartment block in the city. The narrator returns home to a crisis and Boris drives them to the north with a plan to live by the sea. On their journey they discover more about what has happened outside the affected zone, “a natural order both corrupted and fragile”. Their relationship comes under transforming pressures and the silence between them thickens.
Chapters in the later part of the novel are drawn from a letter the narrator’s mother has left him. The journey to the north darkly and powerfully portrays the physicality of death and grief, and how our understanding of our parents can change painfully after they are gone. In an interview in the Barcelona-based newspaper el Periódico earlier this year, Guasch said: “The family is a hellish and at the same time luminous place where you generate a debt that accompanies you throughout your life.” This profoundly strange and beautiful, formally bold and lyrically elevated novel gives the reader compelling storytelling and a space in which to think about love, freedom and survival, and a future to which we might be heading.
• Napalm in the Heart by Pol Guasch, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
