Institut Ramon LLull

Mei leaves the city to find a quiet place to write, returning to her childhood small town, only to fall unexpectedly pregnant and be unexpectedly widowed shortly thereafter. Early on we see her angry streak, her wariness, her paranoia, her grief. Her writing and her fate are in dialogue with Solitude; Victor Català’s Mila becomes her Lila: furious, bitter, on the warpath. Mei’s relationships all become suspect, only the forest streams can wash her clean. Only solitude, in communion with nature, can be her destiny.

Carlota Gurt’s anticipated first novel is structured as a suspenseful countdown of the 185 days before That Day, and what begins as a deceptively quotidian first-person narrative grows markedly in poetic tension. As Mei’s novel burbles up from inside her, the style grows more violent, grotesque, and expressionistic; she has opened a rusty old tap, and it cannot be turned off. She will write until the well runs dry, come what may.