'The Great Replacement', by Albert Pijuan: a carnivalesque novel
Opinion piece that describes, praises or censures, in whole or in part, a cultural or entertainment work. It should always be written by an expert in the field.
I have always liked, and applied it as much as I can, the idea of the Russian essayist Mikhail Bakhtin , one of the great scholars of the culture of the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance, according to which there are works that can be classified as carnivalesque. Everything that opposed official culture in an absolutely humorous register, tended towards the idea of carnival. It upset the established order, it brought down the formal and thematic elites of ideological discourses, including narrative. That is why Bakhtin chose Françoise Rabelais' novel Gargantua and Pantagruel as a paradigm of this idea. Years later, Cervantes put into the mouth of Don Quixote the description of a conceited individual who believed he knew everything, which is why he called himself a humanist. This ridiculous individual devoted himself to studies that were each more dispensable than the last. For example, he wondered irascibly why Virgil had not thought of asking who was the first man to suffer from a cold. In response to such amusing nonsense, Sancho added that one could also ask who was the first man to scratch his head. This whole introduction comes from the new novel by the Catalan-language writer Albert Pijuan (Calafell, 1985), El gran recambio .
Albert Pijuan is the author of the essay ¿Y si nos replanteamos el cannibalismo? He is also the author of La gran ola , a magnificent metaphor about the materialistic abundance that suffocates us, together with the devastating scarcity of moral wealth that diminishes us. Now Pijuan invites us to a literary journey of narrative sinuosity as surprising as it is disturbing. It is often said that novels have a beginning and an end, like life itself, and this is sometimes outlined in a very cheesy way. However, in El gran recambio things do not seem to happen that way. What is very important is that the reader pays close attention to its first chapter, written by the narrator of this unclassifiable (carnivalesque?) novel, Dino de Laurentis, Jr. Here the cornerstone of this building of words is laid, and we do not know where it can lead us, assuming that we are interested in its end compared to the enormous interest that its hilarious course holds for us.
In this initial chapter, Dino Laurentis Jr. (whom we later learn is a resident of Sabadell who believes himself to be the son of the famous Italian film producer), after some thoughtful reflection, realizes that Don Quixote and Sancho would have liked for themselves, that schools of thought and academic circles never noticed the importance of hair styling in the history of humanity. Among other things, because this false son of Laurentis believes that hair has been destined to capture unconscious communications. From here, our hero visits beauty clinics on three different occasions, including one in Krakow. In one of them he meets a famous singer, as much a fraud or madman as he is, who shares a room next to his. In addition, Dino is a film buff and admirer of the actor Nicolas Cage , a famous character, also for the different hairstyles he has used in his voluminous and diverse filmography. And to complete his resume, he writes a series of reports on Cage's changing hairstyles. These will bring you no small number of problems in your existence.
Obviously, Albert Pijuan's novel is the type of novel that any self-respecting literature, in a given language (here Catalan), needs to have in its history to count as substantial literature.
EL PAÍS
