Tons and tons of changes have taken place since 1979, the year Torcuato Luca de Tena published Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios. The way the novel is written takes you back in time. The writing is formal, clean, sentences start and finish, characters are cordial, even when upset. As you turn the pages, cigarettes and the almighty mixture of bleach and smoke smell clung to hospitals and jails are given off. Martin Amis would classified the novel as type A, because of the prominence of the plot. The plot, by the way, is a winding road, with surprises at every corner, but not outlandish. Characters are closed to death, however, and perhaps this is the only clear distinction between the world of the mad and that of us -the sane... Setting the circumstances and the routine at the asylum aside, the fellowship of daily death and violence are like the two immovable and gigantic moons that tells that you are in a different planet, i.e.: the reality of the psychiatric hospital does not belong to the real world. Death comes to the mental patients always unnaturally, in the form of suicide or homicide. Evil inhabits their hearts and is ready to jump outside violently. Cruelty, knifes, sharp rocks, gripping hands and the menace of rape are all faces of the same primitive weapon of violence.
Despite the story and the atmosphere, Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios is an entertaining novel. It is harsh at times, and tender and moving at occasions. Always gripping. In tidy writing, Luca de Tena describes the functioning of the mental institution and their characters vividly, brings the drama of the lunatic, their actions and the scenery they create clearly and, sometimes, punches you in the nose, although not too peevishly. The characters in "the Cage", for example, are hardly human, but the ink of the author does not dramatize them. The big erratas of God in writing the lives of Ofelia "the Gorilla", "the Cyclops" and the "Hanger-Woman" (a woman without spinal cord) do not need much drama that what it takes to write it. The portrait is classic, we can say, and the style consists of reporting it without hallucinogens, like Courbet did perhaps in his paintings. Like Vallejo-Najera wrote in his books. Despite the title of the novel -out of the statement of one of the characters, Sergio Zapatero, the "Astrologer" who, by the way, was finally brought down to death by his disease- there seems not to be any grievance against God, but just a respect to His Mystery.
Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios is an humanistic manifesto. In the prologue, Vallejo-Najera states that confinement in the mental institution is the main motive of the novel, but I can see much more than this. Alice Gould is dismissed by unanimity in spite of the fact that all doctors knew she is paranoiac. And, in return, after months of determined fight to escape the institution, Alice comes back to it within 12 hours of her departure because she has found happiness there or, at least, the path to it. The last two chapters are entitled "the truth of Alice Gould" and "the other truth", respectively.
This is quite significant, that is, that happiness is not reserve to those who are sane or, better, that you do not need to be sane in order to reach a happy state of satisfaction. And also, that humanity is more than logic and reason, to the point that truth is not an absolute value. I come this way to a theme I was fascinated with years ago: probably Love and Its Mystery, so unique to the human condition, is the only absolute value. Everything else is dispensable. Death and, even worse, Deterioration -the condition to lose your prime without a purpose or success, does not really matter. In those days, I found this argument quite definitive to understand what "God is Love" really means.
In the same way that a man and a woman, extenuated beggars, without a penny, ill and hopeless share their emptiness in something resembling love, the stream of Life is not abhorrent to the inhabitants of the mental institution. They love, hate, cry, laugh, get upset and disappointed, feel euphoric or terribly depressive; from time to time, they commit themselves or plan among themselves to walk around, to look through a window or to harm somebody; they are obedient or naughty, they can be convinced or not, they are also able to trust and follow and they can plot against. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. They get better or they get worse. In a word, they are human. Alice -and most of the sane as well- fall soon infatuated by this soil, and her happiness roots down and blossoms in it.
Sometime in 2001 or 2002, C. and M. did their practical training as psychologists in the Psychiatric Hospital of Salamanca, and I come to remember those days now because they use to bring back home drawings or letters that the patients did for them and spent hours talking about their habits, antics or manias, even about their hands, the way they laughed or the bad words they used. They seemed fascinated about the human side of it. In the same way, the story of Alice Gould is all about it.
And this is why this book is just human.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
Despite the story and the atmosphere, Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios is an entertaining novel. It is harsh at times, and tender and moving at occasions. Always gripping. In tidy writing, Luca de Tena describes the functioning of the mental institution and their characters vividly, brings the drama of the lunatic, their actions and the scenery they create clearly and, sometimes, punches you in the nose, although not too peevishly. The characters in "the Cage", for example, are hardly human, but the ink of the author does not dramatize them. The big erratas of God in writing the lives of Ofelia "the Gorilla", "the Cyclops" and the "Hanger-Woman" (a woman without spinal cord) do not need much drama that what it takes to write it. The portrait is classic, we can say, and the style consists of reporting it without hallucinogens, like Courbet did perhaps in his paintings. Like Vallejo-Najera wrote in his books. Despite the title of the novel -out of the statement of one of the characters, Sergio Zapatero, the "Astrologer" who, by the way, was finally brought down to death by his disease- there seems not to be any grievance against God, but just a respect to His Mystery.
Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios is an humanistic manifesto. In the prologue, Vallejo-Najera states that confinement in the mental institution is the main motive of the novel, but I can see much more than this. Alice Gould is dismissed by unanimity in spite of the fact that all doctors knew she is paranoiac. And, in return, after months of determined fight to escape the institution, Alice comes back to it within 12 hours of her departure because she has found happiness there or, at least, the path to it. The last two chapters are entitled "the truth of Alice Gould" and "the other truth", respectively.
This is quite significant, that is, that happiness is not reserve to those who are sane or, better, that you do not need to be sane in order to reach a happy state of satisfaction. And also, that humanity is more than logic and reason, to the point that truth is not an absolute value. I come this way to a theme I was fascinated with years ago: probably Love and Its Mystery, so unique to the human condition, is the only absolute value. Everything else is dispensable. Death and, even worse, Deterioration -the condition to lose your prime without a purpose or success, does not really matter. In those days, I found this argument quite definitive to understand what "God is Love" really means.
In the same way that a man and a woman, extenuated beggars, without a penny, ill and hopeless share their emptiness in something resembling love, the stream of Life is not abhorrent to the inhabitants of the mental institution. They love, hate, cry, laugh, get upset and disappointed, feel euphoric or terribly depressive; from time to time, they commit themselves or plan among themselves to walk around, to look through a window or to harm somebody; they are obedient or naughty, they can be convinced or not, they are also able to trust and follow and they can plot against. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. They get better or they get worse. In a word, they are human. Alice -and most of the sane as well- fall soon infatuated by this soil, and her happiness roots down and blossoms in it.
Sometime in 2001 or 2002, C. and M. did their practical training as psychologists in the Psychiatric Hospital of Salamanca, and I come to remember those days now because they use to bring back home drawings or letters that the patients did for them and spent hours talking about their habits, antics or manias, even about their hands, the way they laughed or the bad words they used. They seemed fascinated about the human side of it. In the same way, the story of Alice Gould is all about it.
And this is why this book is just human.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
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