Two execrable narrators

In the beginning was the word, but then someone wondered who spoke it, and the word became flesh. Every story has a narrator, a figure who may be obvious or remain hidden like an omniscient deity, but who always exists behind the voice that narrates.

In the English-speaking world, the figure of the unreliable narrator is very popular and studied. Whether due to ignorance, bad faith, bias of any kind, or simply mental imbalance, many novels reach us through an equivocal voice. The refined Humbert Humbert in Lolita , for example, the immature adolescent Holden Caulfield in Salinger's novel, or the narcissistic psychopath bequeathed to us by Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho .

In our context, an unreliable narrator due to a formidable mental imbalance is Adrià, the protagonist of El tigre, by Borja Vilallonga (Empúries). Struck by his father's suicide, he surpasses the limits of his mind on a lavish spiritual pilgrimage filled with excesses that leads him to flee from all the tyrannies he perceives in the modern world.

Two unreliable narrators of the execrable genre are Sheriff Nick Corey, by Jim Thompson, and Cleiton, by Giordano Andriola

Now, two very different novels meet on the new releases table, sharing an unreliable narrator of the execrable genre. On the one hand, Sheriff Nick Corey, who governs a small Texas town with an unpayable 1,280 inhabitants , by Jim Thompson (La Segona Perifèria), and on the other, a Brazilian car rental employee named Cleiton, who tells us about his miserable life in La silencio tragèdia d'un calent mental qualsevol (The Silent Tragedy of a Mental Heat of Anything ), by Giordano Andriola (Cap de Brot Edicions), in an excellent translation by the poet Josep Domènech Ponsatí.

Both translations are mouth-watering. Thompson's work is a classic of the hardboiled noir genre, published in 1964, twelve years after her hugely successful The Killer Inside Me (El asesino dentro de mí , in Spanish by RBA). It had already been published in Catalan in the late 1980s under the title 1280 ànimes , but now the same translator, Carme Geronès, has reworked it from top to bottom, making the register even more savage to bring it closer to the original. 1 280 pop .

Corey does all he can in Potts County, abusing the authority granted him by the sheriff's badge as much as he can, and he explains this with cynical clarity from the novel's opening lines. Cleiton, on the other hand, is poor and powerless, but his entire life is governed by a simple goal: "All I think about is fucking. All I think about is diving into a pussy and never getting out. I can't and don't want to tell any psychiatrist about my vice, because they'd be jealous."

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Both are egotistical, misogynistic, uncivil, and homophobic men who act without any moral restraint. Both could preside over any state in today's world. Presidents of the United States and Brazil, respectively.