A generational portrait that is, in turn, the portrait of an era. This is how it could be summed up The proper names, first novel of the philologist, editor and writer Marta Jimenez Serrano . The author immerses us in the story of a girl born in the 90s, who grows up in the early 2000s, and becomes a woman in the years after the 2008 crisis , with a generation whose aspirations have been frustrated and whose The general mood is one of apathy and disenchantment. With its protagonist, and through four chapters, the writer summarizes a biography for us – childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity – that is testimony to a time full of changes, uncertainties, unknowns.
Marta will also be the name of the main character of The Proper Names, a novel in which we perceive doses of autobiography, but whose narration could be that of any boy, girl, adolescent or young person who has grown up and lived in the last 20 or 30 years. There is one of its values. This is not a standard, irrelevant, personal –or impersonal– testimony. It is not a confession without interest. Woolf’s quote, with which the novel begins, is a good example of what we are going to find.
In The Proper Names we read very successful expressions that take us back to childhood landscapes, in a series of descriptions and places that we all carry in our memory: summer, going to work with our parents, family companies, our fears as children. The dialogues in which the protagonist plays in the summer house are exciting and sympathetic, and the way of telling the death of Diana of Wales is very remarkable. A fact that serves the author to reflect on the first times in which children face the name of death, tragedy. How are they abandoning their innocenceand how they manage that ignorance –with a mixture of guilt and shame–. Marta does not know who Lady Di is. She feels less by not understanding what is happening around her. Until her parents explain it to her. When her little sister wakes up, and also asks who Lady Di is, Marta quickly tells her with arrogance and amazement: “Lady Di, please, if she is super well-known.”
One formula that works in the novel is that of the omniscient narrator. A narrator who is the protagonist herself, now an adult, and who speaks with the girl that she was. The former tells the latter about the emotions that she feels about her, the life that she is inaugurating. She teaches him, that’s right, her own names: love, sadness, disenchantment, illusion, enthusiasm. She also anticipates what Marta will experience. At 16, at 29. She tells us about the boyfriends that the protagonist will have,the parties he will attend, the friendships that will turn into disappointments, the academic and work future he awaits. It is difficult not to see yourself reflected in these pages . In this story structured with solvency – there you can see the trade, the readings, the literature –, with subtle analogies between the ages that follow each other – childhood, maturity – and that the reader will find out on his own.
The proper names will be known throughout the story. Also in adolescence. Where Marta knows that love that all of us also knew. A love that educates us in the sentimental, in the sexual, in the affective –in the good and the bad–. A turning point for adult life. If death in childhood is part of a paternal explanation, of the news, of almost a lesson with which to show off with the brothers, in adolescence it takes on another register, another tone. And along with death, the pain of the multiple disappointments we experience, of the fears we face: from exams to social relations, from illnesses to the awareness of the passage of time.. It is the time of change, of transformations, for the characters in the novel, just as there were changes and transformations in those years of “digital revolution”, of messages with abbreviated languages, of technologies that anticipated new realities – social networks, internet –. It is curious: there is a world that evolves and lives that are also advancing, that grow. In a symmetry between global time and the time that belongs to the sphere of the protagonist –which is that of a generation, millennial in this case–.
And in the end everything gets complicated. And new decisions come. First jobs –precarious–, a life in which the argument of the work is gradually being seen –to quote the much-cited poem by Gil de Biedma–. Marta has grown and the expectations that were are no longer so exciting or hopeful. It is the reality of an excellent young woman who lives from her parents despite the various jobs that she is chaining in a working day that has no limits. It is the crude context that survives today, and that opens debates on Twitter and articles and news in the newspapers. The proper names now are those of tedium, monotony, doubt, shared flat, thirty. And a horizon to which the precipice is guessed and that nobody knows very well how to face it.
In The Proper Names, the writer Marta Jimenez Serrano, like the omniscient narrator of her novel, reveals to us the words that define an era, a generation. With a well-resolved story that shows the hours of dedication and craft: from its opening to its similarities, from its development to its moving closure. Between the chapters of it we will go through a kind of generational dictionary, that of those born in the late 80s and early 90s . A generational dictionary where history, sociology and literature come together to offer us a remarkable and interesting novel.
