La ridícula idea de no volver a verte

by Rosa Montero

This is the first book by Rosa Montero I ever read. It took me a while.

That’s how it starts:

Como no he tenido hijos, lo más importante que me ha sucedido en la vida son mis muertos, y con ello me refiero a la muerte de mis seres queridos. ¿Te parece lúgubre, quizá incluso morboso? Yo no lo veo así, antes al contrario: me resulta algo tan lógico, tan natural, tan cierto. Sólo en los nacimientos y en las muertes se sale uno del tiempo; la Tierra detiene su rotación y las trivialidades en las que malgastamos las horas caen sobre el suelo como polvo de purpurina. Cuando un niño nace o una persona muere, el presente se parte por la mitad y te deja atisbar por un instante la grieta de lo verdadero: monumental, ardiente e impasible.

Although it is written in easy enough Spanish, it is no easy reading. (As far as I know, there’s no English translation yet.) Montero chose to deal with her personal tragedy, the death of Pablo Lizcano, in a beautiful and creative way. And she succeeded to convert the mourning into — I hesitate to say “a masterpiece”, but a literary gem nonetheless.

But why Marie Skłodowska Curie? I am not sure. Of course, there are parallels — as there must be. Perhaps not too many though. Montero is fascinated with coincidences, as I am^*. Along the way, she comes up with some interesting albeit sweeping generalisations which, as generalisations go, sound pretty accurate. In any case, I am grateful to the author for her choice. I don’t usually read biographies (this book isn’t one) and knew surprisingly little about Marie Curie.

So... was/is Mme Curie “a splendid role model and a feminist icon” or a “token woman”? Rosa Montero sees right through Marie’s unsmiling exterior and reveals a beautiful human being, a true friend, a passionate lover... To do that, however, she had to go (and take the reader with her) through Marie’s diary, and I was not comfortable with that. Diaries are not meant to be exposed to the outside world.

I read most of The ridiculous idea... feeling that Montero focuses a lot on Marie and (her loss of) Pierre but not that much on Pablo, who is the reason of her research and the book itself. Turns out, I was not the only one wondering about that. It gets explained in the end — to be precise, in the chapter called Escondido en el centro del silencio. The author’s self-censorship is understandable and must be respected. Still, the few paragraphs which actually speak about Pablo are among the most beautiful parts of the book.

*	I am not a fan of hashtags and honestly can’t see any point in placing them (e.g. #HacerLoQueSeDebe or #HonrarALosPadres) in the paper book, but here you are. To make them a bit more useful, Montero even provided the Index of Hashtags (p. 211), in place of, er, just index. And which hashtag do you think is the most popular? #Coincidencias!