Institut Ramon LLull

“Possessions” is how homes are referred to in Majorca, and this novel —in which Llucia Ramis’ alter ego finds her mature voice— plays with this idea of obsession and nostalgia as forms of possession. The novel opens in 1993 with the news of the suicide of a ruined Madrid businessman after murdering his wife and son; his tragic end serves to epitomize the beginning of an era of corruption that has plagued contemporary Spain. As the narrator ponders if it wasn’t that perturbing and inscrutable homicide/suicide that led her to become a journalist, she is drawn back to her native island from Barcelona out of concern for her father’s mental health. There she also must face the loss of her grandparents’ House and with it, so many childhood memories, material and immaterial.

Ramis brings all her journalistic gifts to bear in this elegiac story that interweaves several threads to powerfully evoke all that is lost as one comes of age: not only possessions but also ideals and illusions. Her clear scrutiny illuminates relationships between adult children and their parents, romantic expectations and aspects of our 21st century that are not easy to witness. It turns out that rummaging around in one’s family history to put a finger on that moment “when we were happy” can bring a different sort of wisdom and acceptance, with the knowledge that houses always have and always will belong to the past, and to its ghosts.