Wild Horses by Jordi Cussà (tr. Tiago Miller)
Review by Jessie Jones
In his introduction to Wild Horses, Matthew Tree traces the history of why ‘Catalan literature had not been able to have a local equivalent of the Beat Generation’, claiming that Jordi Cussa’s novel plugs this gap in the region’s literary history. This isn’t, as Tree is keen to stress, solely due to the content being replete with sex, drugs, and a general seedy underbelly. It’s much more to do with the direct, intimate tone of voice that cuts through the page and seems to converse with you rather than at you.
There are these sideways nods throughout that feel like an uncanny breaking of the fourth wall. There are a range of casual tones that feel like interjections designed to include you in a conversation already happening: ‘oh right, yeah: my name’s Alexandre Oscà i Punyol’ and ‘when I asked why (why she took it out on me, I mean)’.
The uncanny aspect feels familiar, but slightly different, recalling Alan Ginsberg’s melancholy and Williams Burroughs’ dark humour. There is conversational language here, sure. There is sex and there are quite visceral passages about the bodies that perform it. The people who orbit our protagonist, the aforementioned Alexandre (or ‘Lex’, to most), are ‘trapping’ crotches in their hands, their sex ‘lustful and hard’. There is graphic detail of drug taking but also colloquialisms like ‘candy’ and ‘lighting a primo’.
The chapters are given strange and dramatic titles: ‘Lost and Found, or Neither of the Two 1. Voodoo Child Back Home’; ‘Bloody Interlude’; ‘Something for Everyone and Everyone on Something’. Each showcases a tapestry of different perspectives, often switching without introduction so that each person’s voice is linguistically unique in the same way that their spoken voices would be accented. There are delightful idiosyncrasies to each.
It’s these moments, astutely woven by Cussà, that makes Lex’s story of melancholic humour so charming. People gain and relinquish temporary control of the narrative but Lux is a constant throughout, tying the tapestry of these other lives together. He acts as the nucleus of the story and his narration is simultaneously heart-breaking and playful. There’s a light-heartedness lent to some of the more sordid passages that serves to highlight the sense of inevitability and inescapability of the whole thing.
At the news of somebody’s death there is a ‘pus-filled pause in memory of Dead Dan’, before moving on, the characters continuing to ‘laugh, and laugh some more’. But then there are also devastatingly honest depictions of an overarching mood: ‘that vertiginous emptiness, that sweet ennui [...] as lethal as it was morbid’ is something that ‘perfectly complemented the emotional memory of my junk years’.
What’s happening in Wild Horses to achieve this feeling? Well, it’s that this is the literature of a moment. This is a novel that is so of its time, so accurate in its depiction of a Catalonian cultural snapshot, yet expansive in its emotional range. It’s so geographically, and psycho-geographically, specific. There’s frequent mention of specific districts, streets, and parks, and regular reference to how many pessetes someone has paid. But also, Lex dips in and out of the same circles, just enough to chronicle a heart wrenching stasis. He goes to find a bar ‘only to confirm it no longer existed’, instead finding it still open and ‘exactly the same as before’ with ‘the same sad clientele’. He represents a meandering search for clarity and cleanliness, both spiritually and physically in terms of abstinence, a character lost in a fluctuation just like the city in which he fluctuates. Sadly, Cussà’ died last year but his debut novel, originally published in 2000 and appearing in English for the first time courtesy of a sensitive translation by Tiago Miller, stands as testament to a fiery talent.
Wild Horses is published by Fum D’Estampa Press, 15th July 2022