One might start with a fancy association and postulate that Arabian Nights y Do not break the night they talk more or less about the same thing: stretching out time, telling stories to delay the inevitable, staying awake (talking to himself or writing), hiding inside a story or a song so that the end, when it comes, I didn’t find you
Somewhere between the nights of Sherazade and the song by Julio Iglesias one could find the literary genre (not specified) and the sentimental pulse (in its own way, very elusive, but sentimental nonetheless) of before you leave home, the new book by Pablo Natale that sets in motion a unique narrative mechanism. A frayed novel?
“The machine to think about Gladys”, by Mario Levrero, as well as Museum of the Eternal Novelby Macedonio Fernández, and the creative restrictions of Georges Perec could also function as grasping branches to climb the family tree that would allow us to find the literary species to which it belongs before you leave home.
But it is not necessary to climb towards any lineage, but to abandon oneself to the imagination of lysergic effects and the mutant sensibility of Pablo Natale, novelist and poet, author of books for children, coordinator of creative writing workshops, screenwriter and musician (“member or former member” of the Greenland Forests band, as the bio leaves in suspension).
It is about 48 short texts, truncated short stories, writing exercises with slogans, fantasies for children who cannot sleep with good monsters and reversible worlds, possible beginnings, plots that sink into a poetic whirlpool, arguments for possible novels that will not be written. , portals to parallel universes, islands of waste and contaminated dogs from a perhaps imminent ecological apocalypse, biographical filaments (why not?), stories that put time in Rewind.
There is no whole that is more than the sum of its parts. That is perhaps the narrator’s chance to ensure that the night does not break. That the book does not become a novel. May each little story expand forever or deviate. Be?
Divided into six segments, the narrative miniatures that make up before you leave home they are woven around a narrator who writes in notebooks that will end up in garbage bags. The tenuous plot thread, like background music, is about a splintered couple, seeing loneliness coming. It is a silver thread that never reaches the dramatic point but reminds, from time to time, that she is about to leave. There was a plan, a life together, the same bed and shared breathing, and the everyday phenomenon of hearing the toilet bag drip, but everything is moving inexorably towards a dissolution. a bit like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Does before you leave home is the expanded account (48 and one stories) of a duel? Will we find them in another story?
- Before you leave home. Pablo Natale. Nudist Editorial. 139 pages. $3,300.