AUTHOR: Juan Jose? Milla?s
PUBLISHER: Seix Barral
GENRE: Hard to tell
READER’S NAME: Félix Lizárraga
DATE: April 2, 2014
With La mujer loca (The Madwoman), Juan José Millás, a well-known Spanish novelist, has written one of those rare books where the reader cannot really fathom what awaits him or her at the turn of the page.
The novel starts with Julia, the titular madwoman, who is studying grammar at night because she has fallen in love with a coworker who is a philologist, and wants to impress him. While she studies, she is accosted by words and phrases that come to her with their own existential and grammatical issues, which she then tries to solve. She is also visited all the time by imaginary people, among whom there is an illiterate mail carrier that comes to her for help reading the addresses on the letters he is supposed to deliver.
We soon learn that she is the subject of a reportage that Millás himself is trying to write, and he starts inserting himself into the narrative until he finally takes over, and we realize that the novel is really about Millás, the author’s alter ego who –like the real Millás—is suffering from writer’s block.
Millás (the character) has met Julia because, after publishing a story in the newspaper El País about euthanasia (which the real Millás did write), he is contacted about a similar case, a woman called Emérita. She and her husband happen to live in the apartment where Julia rents a room –an apartment that also turns out to be a place where Millás lived while in college and where, during an “LSD party”, a girl he knew suffered a psychotic break. With these details, the author seems to be handing us the real-life sources of his fiction, but at the same time is blurring the lines between reality and fiction, so the reader cannot be sure where they begin or end.
Written in a transparent, easy-flowing, conversational prose, the book really shines when it comes to dialog and characterization. The women –Julia, Emérita (who turns out to have a few secrets of her own), and Micaela, Millás’ 80-year-old psychoanalyst—are particularly vivid.
At times wistful, at times wickedly funny, as personal and entertaining as a Woody Allen movie (the good ones, of course), La mujer loca is a book that I hope the American reader will be able to enjoy not too far in the future. It has made me want to read Millás’ previous books. The many passages about the complexities of Spanish grammar will pose some challenges to the translator, but it would be a challenge worth the effort. I know I would love to be that translator.
