The Scar of a Language

Katharina Volckmer reviews Pol Guasch’s “Napalm in the Heart,” translated by Mara Faye Lethem.

By Katharina VolckmerSeptember 29, 2024

• Environment

• Fiction

IT TOOK ME a long time to read Napalm in the Heart (2024). Suspicious of the concept of “readability”—the polishing and lubricating of prose to the point that there is nothing left to shock or surprise in uncalculated ways, or to demand more attention than a Netflix show—I found this debut novel by the poet Pol Guasch, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, to be in many ways the opposite. It’s not unreadable, but it compels the reader to take in every single word. To focus and appreciate all the beauty and the horror that Guasch has so meticulously observed.

First published in 2021, Napalm in the Heart made Guasch the youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Llibres Anagrama de Novel·la prize, a prize for an unpublished novel written in Catalan that is awarded by Anagrama, a Barcelona-based publisher. Set in a landscape marked by ecological disaster caused by events at a nearby factory, Guasch’s story follows an unnamed narrator who faces the daily struggle of life under military occupation, threatened by soldiers who, among many other acts of harm, try to deprive him of his mother tongue, the unnamed language that he and his mother are supposed to forget. It’s clear from the beginning that the question of language, and the identities that come with it, is not only a central theme in this novel but also, in many ways, its essence—the languages we speak with our parents, as part of a community, as acts of rebellion; the words we say to our lovers and those that remain forever buried in our chests. As the narrator puts it: “For this language we speak, which is our home.”

The narration begins 900 days after the catastrophe. The narrator has been counting them using tally marks, and when we first meet him, he still lives with his mother. His father has died by suicide and he’s just lost his grandfather as well. Most people around them have left except for their neighbor Vita. The nearby city where the narrator’s lover, Boris, still manages to live is “a desert of skyscrapers.” The atmosphere is tense. Food is scarce and life is reduced to its bare necessities. People have “lost [their] sense of eternity.” They are worried about wolves coming down the hill, the military is omnipresent, and life has become precarious. The soldiers’ heads are shaved, and they speak the other language. Though it is not the only aspect of language portrayed in the novel, it is compelling to imagine that the world Guasch has created here has its roots in the struggle of the Catalan people against the Francoist repression of their culture. At the same time, this fight for resistance feels universal, one of the many qualities of Guasch’s writing. As a young man, the narrator is not supposed to leave the house or make his existence known (I would not call this a COVID-19 novel, but Guasch has certainly captured a sense of isolation and man-made doom, a definite caesura outlined by memories of people suddenly dying in great numbers for reasons that are unclear) but he goes out anyway: to the forest.

In this novel, nature is a source of comfort as well as meticulously detailed despair. Despite the forest being lush and green, we get a sense during the protagonist’s early encounters with it that nature is sick. This suspicion is confirmed when Boris and the narrator embark on their road trip. The landscapes they encounter are hostile and dystopian; people are kept in labor camps, forced to harvest strange-looking fruit. Others are wandering deserts in search of plants that will make them high. Instead of functioning communities, Boris and the narrator come upon people who are poor and displaced, who have lost their connection with nature as well as with each other. They are no longer able to live off the land that other humans have destroyed. And yet, nature remains a place of longing and projection. Boris and the narrator dream of setting up house together in an idyllic place by the sea while never being able to outrun the broken landscapes they discover. Guasch reveals that these illusions come from the same source as the destruction they see everywhere. Illusions, in this novel, are also places of violence. It’s in these contrasts that Guasch’s writing captivates, in prose that is unafraid of the concomitance of beauty and horror, of showing that everything has the potential to either inspire us to stay alive or to give in to despair. Guasch also finds ways to describe the sense of climate grief that many of us feel for a world we can remember but which now seems irretrievably lost: “Before dying, life was everywhere—the fish migrating upriver, against the current; the end of the bear’s hibernation, and the bellows echoing through the valley; the bees about to explode like bullets from so much pollen—life was being born everywhere.”

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There is something special about the way Guasch weaves violence into Napalm in the Heart. Even as violence is a part of beauty and nature, here it is not pornographic or lurid, exaggerated or gory, but imaginable, and often understandable—which makes it all the more intense when the narrator commits his first murder.

A soldier visits the narrator’s mother, and like many women before her in similar circumstances, she has no way of refusing him. “They destroyed all of me, except my soul” is how their neighbor Vita describes her experience of being taken away by those soldiers. It comes as a surprise when the narrator loses his innocence to a soldier. Innocence in this novel is not lost through sexual experience, a concept that is absent from the narrator’s relationship with Boris, but through violence. The soldier who approaches the narrator’s mother becomes the first man her son kills, and the lesson he learns from it is as disturbing as it is profound. And yet the beauty of the forest remains untouched by this act of violence, which is central to the world as Guasch describes it: “I wanted to listen to the world, understand it.”

The other lesson the narrator learns from years spent under military occupation is that these systems of oppression never just disappear. They leave scars behind, and the freedom that the remaining inhabitants of his village are given at the end of the book’s first section feels like yet another loss. Guasch is wise to the fact that the reality that comes with big words such as “freedom” or “liberation” is complicated: “The departure is like ripping off a scab. As we lose sight of the final tank, we scratch at it furiously until blood streams down our legs. If only it would come back like that, with that potency, the life from before.”

What follows is a road trip: Boris and the narrator’s attempt to leave it all behind. But unlike the usual feel-good vibes associated with this kind of scenario—two handsome young men on the road—their journey is filled with a sense of dread. In a world devoid of technology, they rely on maps to find their way and never manage to shake their fear of the unknown. Moreover, their attempt to escape their world seems doomed from the beginning. It doesn’t get much worse than setting off with the decomposing body of the narrator’s mother in the back of the car. What sounds like an absurd situation becomes a moving meditation on loss and the meaning of the relationships we have with our parents, as the mother’s body decays in the back of the car.

The narrator and Boris also transport the notes the mother left behind for her son. Unfolding in broken sentences and snatches of conversation, they tell the story of a life made small by having another language forced upon her: “[H]ide that hellish accent,” she remembers being instructed. It’s in these passages, scattered throughout the second part of the book, that Guasch’s gift as a poet comes to the fore. Though these notes tell the story of a very painful upbringing, a mother only breaking her silence in death, there is once again beauty to be found in the way the words are arranged on the page as poetic lines: “from top to bottom, my entire belly / the scar of a language.”

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As a writer who has given up her German mother tongue in favor of writing in English, I’m intrigued by the way Guasch approaches language in this novel. It’s too narrow a conclusion to only read Napalm in the Heart as a novel about the Catalan struggle against oppression, as I feel that Guasch’s understanding of language goes far beyond such a limited allegorical analysis. While some of it derives from the experience of defending a mother tongue as an essential part of one’s identity, Guasch also offers an analysis of all the languages that are contained within that mother tongue, and which are always at risk of falling prey to oppression or distortion. The words we use at home, in public, and with our lovers, even the words we use with ourselves, are all political. They are signifiers of freedom or one’s lack thereof, as language can be a technique of violence. Guasch is acutely aware that every single word matters, that each word can be a step toward or away from the kind of lives we wish to live.

Napalm is also a story of first love, first desire—an exploration of what a violent system does to our ability to love. Boris remains an enigmatic figure right until the end when he disappears, leaving the narrator to fend for himself among a group of people who are also lost and stranded. “[L]ike small animals in a cave, they welcome me,” he writes. The narrator shares a language with Boris that is only for his lover. We find it expressed in the many letters he writes to Boris, only to witness how this language then fails him when he is with his beloved. Much of their time together is spent in silence: they communicate via their bodies. When he sleeps with Boris, the narrator feels a proximity to animals that can be traced throughout the novel, whether with hens or wolves. It’s among nonhumans that the narrator seems to feel most at home, most protected and seen: “Because if a rat were to see Boris and me, it would think we are two young beasts just learning about this, who don’t want to speak a word when they meet up because they just want to touch each other, and pound each other, clumsily, and bellow, deep, like wild creatures.”

The narrator grows up in a world where his body and his desires are unable to fulfill his own expectations, along with those of others. While the narrator chips away at describing experience through language, Boris tries to capture his reality in photographs. These black-and-white images are also scattered throughout the second part of the novel, showing mostly animals and nature. They become a third voice within the story, next to that of the narrator and his mother’s notes, another language that the two of them have for each other, or think they do. “How can a language inside another language be understood?” the narrator wonders.

Just as Boris and the narrator lose each other toward the end of the novel, so does the narrative thread become harder to follow, losing its intensity. At last, it picks up again, in a final crescendo leading us toward the gloriously bizarre and deeply poetic scene in which the narrator fulfills his promise of disposing of his mother’s body far away from home. It serves as the ultimate proof that Guasch’s novel is not simply another work of sad-man-lit (a term I like to use for a recent trend in literature of books written by men in minor keys) but something much rarer and more exciting: a world seen through the eyes of a writer who is not afraid of his own imagination.