A few days ago in Postposmo we discussed The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère, and what a coincidence, of all the books by Juan José Millás , it was precisely in The Disorder of Your Name that we found a reflection that would have fit quite well into the review, commentary, analysis, or something like that the other day:
“Daily life is full of unlikely events that are good material for the events pages because, although they lack logic, they have in their favor the fact that they happened. Those same events, in a novel, would seem false. The laws of verisimilitude are different in reality and in fiction.
If we have put it here it is because it is also doing very well for this one.
The Disorder of Your Name review
Like so many other oddballs you run into, those who swarm around with ridiculously round glasses, something tweed, and a gaze fixed on the infinite, Julio Ortega is a writer who hasn't published a single book in his life. Well, he has published, because he's actually an editor, and a big one at that. Planeta or Alfaguara at the very least. But writing, real writing, nothing.
Well, he does write. Mentally, he churns out some hefty tomes. Shortly after starting The Disorder of Your Name , Julio Ortega begins mentally sketching out his new novel: it occurs to him that the beautiful Laura he meets in the park every Tuesday and Friday after leaving the psychoanalyst, that mature woman whose love makes him feel "on the other side of things," is actually his psychoanalyst's wife.
In said novel under construction in Julio's mind, the psychoanalyst is aware that his wife is having a hard time with his patient (plausible premise). Also, the woman who plays Laura is aware that her lover is a client of her husband (hard to believe), and the only one who doesn't step on anything is Julio's own protagonist and alter ego (unbelievable). .
It happens that the story that Julio Orgaz fantasizes about is not fiction but reality, since that is what is happening (very unlikely). To top it off, both in the novel and in real life, the adulterous couple plans to murder the third party (very, very unlikely).
In summary, the book starts well and, after a while, it becomes a filmmaker of care. That said, more bizarre and unlikely cases throw up life itself on a daily basis.
Curling the curl of the plot of The disorder of your name
Bonus for implausibility : Julio Orgaz's own psychoanalyst not only listens attentively, visit after visit, to the account of the sexual escapades his wife and patient engage in, but he also feels a kind of pleasurable interest in the fact that there is a man who so desires this woman he isn't in love with and with whom he lives in a purely administrative capacity, his only pleasure being having someone to clean the house and raise his daughter.
Vila-Matesco metaliterary bonus : The novel that Julio Orgaz is writing/imagining is titled The Disorder of Your Name.
But let's not get carried away just yet. Juan José Millás's book is somewhat far-fetched, yes. But, once we've established the foundations of this entertaining exercise in metaliterature he's led us into, it's well worth highlighting what we read on page 101. In a fit of vanity, Julio Orgaz tells a young writer the plot of the novel he's writing, and the writer, arrogant but sincere, tells him that it's "a good vaudeville, a farce, a love triangle, that can produce funny and tense situations."
Isn't Millás himself winking at us and confessing that this book that concerns us today is nothing more than that, a quick-reading book for the drawer that you are leaving?
Love as a container with an expiration date
Its protagonist is a rather despicable, solitary, divorced man with a son he wants nothing to do with. Suffering from a midlife (and/or existential) crisis, he believes he hears The Internationale everywhere and is convinced that Laura is the resurrection of his former lover, Teresa.
The resurrection not so much of the person as of that thing , of that feeling. Pay attention to this paragraph:
“I fall in love with women thinking that they have that something that I lack, but that nonetheless concerns me. Actually, every woman I look at seems to hold fragments of something that belongs to me; occasionally, in one of them the sum of all these parts occurs and then I fall in love. Naturally, they are unaware that they own what is mine, just as Laura is unaware that Teresa lives in her gestures, or in her eyes, or in her voice, or, finally, in the way she sheds her hair. for my chest».
One more note and off we go. Because the idea follows:
What happens is that, after a while, or the relationship having reached a certain point, that which was so visible disappears, volatilizes and appears gratuitously in another. Then the woman she loved takes on that appearance of solidity and lack of tone that she possesses in all other things. Some fragment may remain in it, some brightness of the previous totality, but that does not calm my desire for completeness. Sometimes I think that what women circumstantially harbor is passed from one to another to drive me crazy”.
Perhaps calling the book vaudeville is cruel. There is more to him than love and despair. There is reflection. The metaliterary game and the idea that we can all change our roles in life at a given moment (quite revealing is the moment in which we lose all respect for the psychoanalyst when he himself sits on the couch of a much older and more experienced ) make this book, in addition to entertaining, keep you fluttering in your head for a few days.
The disorder of your name, Juan José Millás
Barcelona, Seix Barral 2012 (Original publication date: 1986)
189 pages | 8 euros