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L'adolescent de sal
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Wikipedia article
'Ladolescent de sal' is a novel by the Catalan writer Biel Mesquida published in 1975, that denounces 1970s society from the passionate perspective of a teenager.
Plot summary
A young man from Mallorca analyzes the crisis of bourgeois consciousness through the sparse writing of prose and poems that express repression, the desire for freedom, and the discovery of love and pleasure.
The boy struggles with his inner contradictions to eliminate old prejudices and transform society. Both the work and the act of writing are presented as acts of rebellion against the establishment Catholicism, police oppression, society based on the traditional family, and the traditional road to riches. The young man discovers gradually the culture that he had been denied him due to a punitive religious education. A narrator presents the work as one in which the teenager expresses his point of view, emotions, fears and insights. The idea is that the reader advances through the text in a dialectical way to come to his or her own conclusions.
Cheska, the protagonists girlfriend who studies theater, will be on the receiving end of the adolescents literary efforts.
Major themes
His mother serves as a symbol of oppression: through her monologues, we understand the challenge that the reading of her sons pages has posed to her traditional values.
The father represents power and authority, and, finally, the study group provides the brushstrokes of historical context.
Analysis
The reader participates in a meta-text that imitates the style of the school punishments, religious dogmas, and press releases, that is mixed in with the nascent writings of the teenager.
Stylistically, the text is notable for the fragmentation and mixture of genres: diary, letter, prose, poem, comics, etc.
Formal innovation is presented disruptively in several ways: quotes are recurrent and demanding; the typography is used to denounce or to highlight characters or ideas; the footnotes acquire narrative and theoretical value; the fiction within a fiction assumes a Brechtian ethico-revolutionary character.
Drawings, handwritten lines, censored cutouts and galley proofs provoke the readers reflection.
Awards and nominations
'Ladolescent de sal' marked a milestone in 1970s Catalonia, and won the Prudenci Bertrana prize.
References
Category:1975 novels
Category:20th-century Spanish novels
Category:Catalan-language novels
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