AUTHOR: Andrea Genovart
PUBLISHER: Anagrama
GENRE: Novel
READER’S NAME: Maria Julia Rossi
DATE: August 11th, 2023

Alba Giraldo Domènech is a young Spanish woman affected by contemporary ailments: some are generational, some are national, some are just being a lost youngster seeking a path in a growingly disenchanted world. She lives in a shared apartment in Barcelona (pretty much like the one in the 2002 movie The Spanish Apartment), and works as a junior graphic designer, an underpaid job with very limited benefits. She has a somehow ambiguous love/sex relationship with Uri, and not very close relationships with her cousin Clara (an idealized version of the contemporary young woman who did everything by the book, only to become an exploited doctor working many hours a week), her distant parents, and her former classmate and best friend Berta. Alba’s monologue includes many cultural references to a disintegrating world (quoting authors whose works she does not even read and ideals that sound good but feel empty), and it is plagued with expressions that belong to the virtual world, expressing how she and her generation live in a reality that has been—and still is—affected by sources that seem and feel both far from reality and very much present and invasive of her universe.

The novel starts with a morose and detailed description of Alba, narrator and protagonist, throwing up a cheap dinner she had the night before. This opening scene sets up the tone for a narration that revels in ugliness and a smart cynicism through which the narrator sees the world around her. As a young member of the impoverished Spanish middle class, Alba does not trust any progressive or enlightened discourse: she makes fun of feminist discourses, of both right wing and left-wing ideologies, of education and literature, of models of family and people who are passionate about their work. During her inner monologue (which takes up, with a couple of exceptions, most of the novel), she goes to work in a small graphic design company, goes to a party at a friend’s house, visits a journalistic photography exhibit with Uri (a lover with whom she maintains an ambiguous relationship with no strings attached), goes home. Scenes are domestic and dwell on the minuscule: her roommates are mad at her when she leaves the key in the keyhole at the front door of the apartment, her cousin calls her to discuss a gift for Alba’s mom’s birthday, she and her friends feel better about themselves when they run into a migrant selling crafts during the night of the party.

Things change when Alba runs into Berta’s boyfriend in the subway and he tells her that they are creating a publishing house focused on philosophy, and Alba is later fired from her inane job (the monologue of her boss is an example of the sweetened neoliberal discourse that mixes new age views with zero respect to the employee’s labor rights.) She imagines different versions of the last encounter with Uri in which they might be breaking up, but even this is unclear and vague. Having lost all her lukewarm links with material life (no job, no partner, no friend), Alba goes to her grandparent’s empty house in a small town where she, once again, finds nothing to do. Having all the time in the world, she is close to finding out her own inner emptiness, when her parents ask her to do something with her life. That’s when we find out she is 30, an age her parents see as one in which she should be doing something with her life. She goes back home and takes some of the trash out, but not all of it because it’s too heavy.

Although Alba’s background in Philosophy (her college major) is presented by her sometimes like a mistake and sometimes like a useless degree, all her readings somehow inform her cynical and disappointed vision of life. The criticism Alba states or implies occurs at different levels. There is hardship at the personal level, since her involvement with humans around her is superficial and noncommittal--from her parents to her lover and her friends. Also at the social and economic level: she belongs to a generation that is somehow forced to precarious labor conditions. And there is also a deep criticism of the humanities, a field with career paths that lead to nowhere, as well as a criticism of neoliberal politics of all kinds. Alba is also personally apathetic and disengaged (she lacks any genuine interest or enthusiasm), unable to even read when she is fired from her work and in no speaking terms with almost anyone in her universe.

This anti-bildungsroman of sorts reflects on the contemporary disenchantment many youngsters have been experiencing in Spain for a while now (as described by Silvia Nanclares’s novel Quién quiere ser madre, 2017), told with a scathing tone (similar to Argentine writers Ariana Harwicz’s La débil mental, 2014, and Leila Sucari’s Fugaz, 2019). Genovart’s voice is powerful and adds the power of anger to the situations desscribed. Translating Consum preferent could be something of a challenge since much of its sharpness and power of criticism, its poignancy, comes from a very well calibrated use of Catalan (and sometimes Spanish) sayings and adages from earlier generations, as well as direct references to very local brands and cultural artifacts that define the protagonist’s universe. While inhabiting an old language conspires against Alba finding her own genuine voice, the presence of these expressions provides the prose with a level of joy that most of the novel lacks. These linguistic games would pose an interesting challenge to recreate in English. The translator would have to find analogous sayings that work in the context but also produce that sense of iteration and evocation of an old world that is both being yearned and despised.