Glòria de Castro: “Abans als contes hi sortia sang and mutilacions”

Nina, her husband, Ivan, and her brother Ariel, have to escape from the apartment on Viuen, to the big city, for the peril that you leave behind the caure faction. They ended up in the antic further away where there was a small sight, near a panto and an abandoned industrial colony, where there was no return after fleeing a tragic night of storm. While living in a cramped motorhome, they had to rebuild the house and share it with all three of them. These are the coordinates in which it is my Els temples solemnes (Periscopi, Lumen en castellà), the second novel by Glòria de Castro (Caldes de Montbui, 1974), which arrives three years after having won the award Llibreter amb L'instant abans de l'impacte (Periscopi/Lumen, 2022).

The writer has attempted to construct “a gothic story that relates the destruction and reconstruction of a family that is in crisis: the old house is enfonsant, with the still life, and then they rebuild a very dark house that also has very dark spaces. “foscor d'ella mateixa and de la casa”. “In life, there has been a moment when we have to confront these follies and all that has happened from which we have fled, facing what has continued metaphorically,” he says about a protagonist who “has to develop the urban world to return to managing the countryside” in a dystopia: “I'm so reticent about technology, how will it be? "As for the previous novel, and here there are solar storms, in which the satellites do not work, it served as an excuse for the mobile phones to disappear from the scene."

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“It is assumed that the family is a thing that you have to feel safe and saved, but it is also that the worst violence is perpetrated,” the author assures, so she believes “the family structure that seems so beautiful can end up in prison, and life in parella can end up in a mess with both walls.” Amb tot, she bets on love, “she faces that she continued to rebuild and salvage.”

While he was writing – a process in which he will lose a first erasure and when they are going to steal a motxilla from the book –, De Castro worked in the construction of his house, to Mallorca, and now it is going to filter into the writing: “In a city all is with many civilitzat, while in the camp and you turn a salvatge mica, because you have "Take out rocks, collect things, fight with insects, with punxes, with brushes, and save this part." The structure, complex, plays very well with the balance, like the dance – Nina was a ballerina, and the writer is not an amateur –: “I compare it with a ball game, because if a ballarina moves forward or is slow, the entire choreography is caucasian. everything could be chaos.” The dance is also the hard observation of "beauty, which is disappearing and is now associated with an economic acquisition or consumption, while at the moment the world of art is very precarious. We believe beautiful and program things, yes, but when it comes to truth it is a disaster of precariousness. The mateixes Ballarines are conceived with things to create beauty, but afterward their things are nafres, contractures and injuries.”

“The beauty of nature is associated with economic acquisition or consumption,” says the writer.

The novel also includes literary homages, beginning with Shakespeare's The Tempestat – “a story from a family nucli, with a foreign war and a war within, and some magical elements” –, a text format with the beginnings of many novels and many other literary references, such as the German Grimm's quotes: "They contain the germ of all the stories, but the originals, because they are all sweetened and all the books for the children seem to have to be talking about the emotions. Ens estem idiotitzant, while they abans als contes hi sortia sang and mutilacions."