The atmosphere is stifling in the family imagined by Sara Mesa (Madrid, 1975). If the parents have first names, they are first named Father and Mother – which says it all. They have four children. Damián, Rosa, Aquilino as well as Martina, adopted following the death of her mother (Mother’s sister).
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They are educated according to rigorous precepts by a Father who rules his little world. The Mother is not left out, even if we quickly realize that it is a question of submission. In the chapter “Resistance”, Sara Mesa retraces the beginnings of the couple, the only attempt at rebellion by Laura (Mother’s first name) who would not have wanted her first child, if it had been a girl, to bear her first name, the difference from Damián who will give him his. On the other hand, in order not to “humiliate” her husband, who is shorter than her, she abandons the idea of wearing heels…
Sara Mesa “One Love”
Different reactions
Under the caustic pen of Sara Mesa, whose Family is the fourth work after Four by four (Shore, 2015), Scar (Rivages, 2017) and A love (Grasset, 2022), the impacts of a repressive education when one becomes an adult are analyzed. Can we survive or not? If yes, at what price? Will each member of the offspring be affected in the same way?
The construction of the writer is brilliant, who moves back and forth in time where we follow, for example, Rosa who, as a teenager, goes out at night, without the knowledge of her parents, with the complicity of Martina. Later, she became a teacher, but was also a kleptomaniac and the mother of a child whose custody was taken away from her. Obviously, everyone reacts differently. The little girls readily mock the Father’s solemn and obsequious tone – especially when his back is turned. Damián will have tried to obey but at his expense. Aquilino will decide alone the course to follow “according to one’s intuition and good will, without waiting for instructions, advice or orders.”
Denis Dercourt “Evreux”
Fragile bubble
As soon as invigorating air enters this bubble, it is about to burst. Like Uncle Oscar who comes to shake the foundations, with cream éclairs and gifts for the children, when, according to Father’s precepts, we must live in the strictest sobriety. Disconcerted by what he sees, he will uncover part of the latter’s secret by daring to go searching in his office…
Another rebellious voice is that of Paqui, whose “the apparent absence of responsibilities, the chaos as enticing towards one’s own family” impress the young teenager that Rosa is.
The final pages of Family are as dazzling as they are destabilizing – Sara Mesa inviting the reader to question memories. What each person believes they have experienced and what they really experienced.
⇒ Family | Novel | Sara Mesa, translated from Spanish by Delphine Valenti | Grasset, 272 pp., €22, digital €16
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EXTRACT
“It wasn’t because of the change in menu, who knows what the cause was, or rather no one could know. The fact is that, for the first and last time, Mother prepared chicken with pineapple and Father refused to eat a dish, he said pretentious. At his words, Mother’s expression changed several times in the space of a few seconds: first a nervous tic, then surprise, and from there the worry of not knowing how the servitude and the anger.”
