New Spanish Books,<\/a> and has been reprinted here with permission of the reviewer. The book was originally published in the Catalan by Anagrama as<\/em> Joyce i las gallinas.<\/p>\nAnna Ballbona\u2019s recent, highly praised, debut novel Joyce y las gallinas<\/em> follows the misadventures of Dora, a young, disillusioned Catalan journalist who commutes to Barcelona by day from the rather hermetic and lifeless suburbs around the small industrial city of Granollers. Dora\u2019s uninspiring assignments, anodyne reporting on inconsequential city hall press conferences and\u2013for the fourth consecutive year\u2013Epiphany parades for children, leave her hungry for more vital literary and artistic experiences. A weekend holiday to Ireland and an unexpected invitation to a Finnegans Wake<\/em> reading introduce her to Murphy, a Dubliner whose two passions in life are studying James Joyce and raising chickens\u2014not for eggs or meat, but as pets\u2013hence the novel\u2019s title Joyce y las gallinas<\/em> [Joyce and the Hens]. Sensing in Murphy\u2019s obsession something stranger and more authentic than her workaday life of commuting, reporting on non-news, and playing half-heartedly at the singles game, Dora finds a catalyst (or is it a siren song?) in the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop<\/em>. Under the conceptual spells of mimesis, replication, and transgression, determined to make her own original statement, Dora\u2019s double dose of aesthetic override drives her to adopt an alter ego (Banx) and pursue a new, double life of artistic vandalism\u2014or is it \u201cBanxism\u201d?<\/p>\nThe ensuing comedy of errors reveals Ballbona\u2019s novel to be a clever, tightly-stitched contemporary Catalan Dubliners<\/em>, a sheaf of echoing episodes exploring problems of identity, self-worth, family ties, technology, sterile voyeurism, the perennial anxiety of influence, and the desire to escape from the endless looping subroutines of social conformity. Dora\u2019s odyssey courses our queasy fear that in a biological world of despoiled wilderness and landscapes, our only escape from the social mandate is an ever-circling flight within our own manias. This includes how Murphy\u2019s hen obsession echoes through Dora\u2019s story in a variety of gallina<\/em> permutations both silly and serious, as she associates freely and comically about hen-based memories from her past, and begins seeing, with ever-greater significance, new and different ones in the strangest of places.<\/p>\nBallbona\u2019s multifaceted central metaphor, \u201cgallinas,\u201d certainly stands for the traditional Spanish mother, domineering and devoted, the mother hen who keeps family and society meaningfully intact, but also, in our early twenty-first century, stranded in an increasingly anachronistic past. Of course, in English, \u201cgallina\u201d also means \u201cchicken\u201d\u2014both as the helpless candidate for the stewpot and as a blinking, clucking coward. So in Anna Ballbona\u2019s satire, seemingly as familiar and innocuous as a hen\u2019s white egg, we all turn out to be chickens. This is a novel about deception (legal, illegal, and extra-legal), self-delusion, people (all of us?) who hide in plain sight and live in perennial desire for, and fear of, self-exposure, insisting on false appearances even as we (pretend to) revile them. It\u2019s a satire on the cloistered voyeurism that results from our inability to relate to family and society as traditional life is erased, and replaced, dualistically, by an implacable technology and a fractured aesthetic to which we find ourselves beholden, whose implications we cannot understand, but to whose chimes we pirouette, enthralled and in thrall.<\/p>\n
Seeking to enact a masterful Joycean-Banksyan performance (one that seems patently ridiculous until we see that it\u2019s really something else), Dora appropriately plays a strange and elaborate game of chicken with her community, right up until the very suspenseful climax, perhaps achieving what she intended, and perhaps achieving something worse, perhaps inevitably so. Dora wants to rouse the world from its somnolence, but is she really the blind sleepwalker, oblivious to the absurdity of her mimesis?<\/p>\n
In addition to clear, measured and subtly wry prose, engagingly cerebral with a light touch, Joyce y las gallinas<\/em> also sports a fine and effective cast of secondary characters. Most notably we meet\u2013following a strange encounter between a tennis aficionado and a Rottweiler\u2013the noxious Alfred\u2014a sleazy, henpecked forty-something dysfunctionally devoted to his mother, Engracieta\u2014who provides sinister comic menace and vital suspense.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s a happy fact of geography for Ballbona that one of the familiar train depots heading out of Barcelona to Granollers, a busy stop on Dora\u2019s daily commute, is Montcada Bifurcaci\u00f3. In a book about double lives and alter egos (Jekyll and Hyde is\/are name-checked early on) this is a resonant binomial. Montcada is a small mountain at the north end of the Collserola massif; conspicuously quarried away for generations, it is gradually being flattened to nothing\u2014a mountain ceasing to be a mountain, a name without a place, a place without its namesake. It is not unlike the questing Dora\u2014a young Catalan woman at odds with her people, place, and tradition; a journalist who finds little meaning in daily life, who feels herself a very bland sort of belle du jour<\/em>, a woman who finds a kind of cowardly courage to become, by night, a headless chicken on the run that really wants to be a crowing rooster. Birfurcaci\u00f3 means, of course, bifurcation, and as Dora dwells on that train stop, (and given the novel\u2019s wild, peculiar climax that feels rather more Flann O\u2019Brien than strictly Joyce), bifurcation brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges\u2019 signature story \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths\u201d (in Spanish, El jard\u00edn de los senderos que se bifurcan<\/em>). And just as Borges\u2019s koan-like fiction of forking fortune leaves the reader reverberating with wonder and doubt, Ballbona\u2019s slender, artful dodger of a novel plays its black box finale with a very deft sleight-of-hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joyce y las gallinas\u00a0by Anna Ballbona 200 pgs. | pb |\u00a09788433937261 |\u00a0\u20ac17.90\u00a0 Anagrama Reviewed by Brendan Riley This review was originally published as a report on the book at New Spanish Books, and has been reprinted here with permission of the reviewer. The book was originally published in the Catalan by Anagrama as Joyce […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":401112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[8346,66916,11086,50626,66926,66946,66936,1646],"class_list":["post-307646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-anagrama","tag-anna-ballbona","tag-book-reviews","tag-brendan-riley","tag-joyce-y-las-gallinas","tag-maria-paz-ortuno","tag-new-spanish-books","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307646"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404082,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307646\/revisions\/404082"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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