Pol Guasch (Tarragona, 1997) begins Relic with a categorical affirmation: “I appreciate the note.” In keeping with the novel’s characteristic development, the reference to allusions, which are suggested and unspecified, nevertheless reveals in the sequel what it refers to: it is reproach to his father. Before you ended your life—if you did—you may have left a few words on a simple piece of paper or an old servant; I’ve had enough with her of telling her I want her or trying to forget her in the house with wrong words and bad words.
Relic
Paul Gouache
Translated by Unai Velasco. Anagram, 2026. 159 pages. €11.99
According to this initial explanation, Guasch is abysmal in his exploration of suicide and the meaning of death. He goes to his father as a “relic” which the title refers to, but without any sacred connotations, but as a relic or vestige of the past, dedicated to recording the one who is “unknowingly dead”.
This emotional work filtered through analytical lucidity brings him back to life ten years after he parted ways with his father and materializes it in the book he has been writing since his life. With him demands understand the reason for suicide with great perspective which transcends genetic and social determinants.
Guasch’s investigation is ongoing obsessive drive in which he is not satisfied with managing his personal experiences because he considers them insufficient or because he wants to eliminate the universal reason for suicide and resort to the testimony of sufficiently well-known suicide authors. The first-person story is therefore enhanced and enriched by texts and confessions from dozens of authors, from Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Anne Sexton, Alejandra Pizarnik or Sylvia Plath.
But Guasch does not limit herself to telling the story of anything but the imprint of absence left by her father’s suicide in the fourth and fourth year of quince. On the contrary, describe a cathartic autofiction that glosses over this traumatic episode and extends through his complete biography, from his childhood and experience of his homosexual condition, and through his family, consisting of his ancestors and two adopted brothers. Reflections on love and friendship also belong to the relationship.
This lyrical novel is an emotional confession, a hard and bitter autobiography
In addition, he adds a good set of reflections that transform it into a narrative of thoughts, very philosophical, expressed in a simple and fearless tone. Everything, on the other hand, is wrapped up in the idealistic proclamation of literature, embodied in the very book we read, as the only, or at least the best, way to understand the world and confront its silences and mysteries.
From the results of these multiple anecdotal and thematic findings, salt an emotional confession, a hard and bitter autobiographywith very crude moments such as the transcription of the suicide autopsy report, but simple, free of melodrama and pathos.
El quid de Relic it is not allowed without an embargo in content, as long as it does not seek the so-called lyrical novel in its form. Pol Guasch wrote on his father’s vigorous posthumous paper using an impressionist technique. A narrow story has little weight in it. In this place, it is based on the inspiration of subjective poetry. Evocation is fragmented in the air and comes in discontinuous time. Although the given links are unusual, there are few concrete ones. The adventure, while clearly connected to the book, is lost anxious and capricious mind of the author. Pol Guasch’s artistic writing requires moderate reading and close attention, but is well worth the effort.

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