isaac rosa: feliz final (an emotional archaeology of hetero limits and boredom)
Feliz Final (2018), Isaac Rosa has managed to pull a very interesting narrative feat that reminds me of Pierre Menard and is also the way history should be taught. He has told the story of a heterosexual middle class romance backwards: from the present divorce filings to the moment they met. What is most commendable is the effort to write the story of a regular couple hit by the recession, without any idealization. He even has tried to to bring to the periphery of the narrative political problems of the present: from refugees crossing the Mediterranean sea to the historical memory of the husband's grandmother or feminist debates across different generations of women. The use of two different fonts allows him to bring the voices of the two protagonists without an artificial "he said" "she said" quotational system. Yet, I believe that the main success, the most interesting result, of the novel is unintended: it shows how boring, how predictable, how mechanical, how scripted is the inner life of a couple. Not because the text is boring, but rather the opposite, because the text masterfully exhausts most of the possible scenarios of the life of the precarized middle class, without sounding the panic alarm against neoliberalism. This Foucaultean archaeology of European middle-class heterosexual romance is also its most successful indictment. It is also a monument to the way couple life depoliticizes even an author who is really trying to politicize it. Comments are closed.
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AuthorJoseba Gabilondo. Publications Archives
April 2023
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