Napalm in the Heart is Catalan writer Pol Gausch’s debut, originally published in 2021 and now translated into English by Mara Faye Letham. The novel is set in a dystopian landscape where the narrator lives with his mother in a militarised zone, occupied by an army with a different language. It is a novel filled with death; within a few pages the narrator reports:
“I found him dead among the tomato plants and cold, as cold as the winter frost… Grandpa dead, his heart destroyed. From so much wating… For nine hundred nights he’d held out.”
Later the narrator will tell us how he discovered his father, dead by his own hand, and in the novel’s second half he will travel with the body of his mother. There are echoes of Chernobyl in the novel’s setting, a town centred on ‘the Factory’. The narrator, whose limited understanding of events may be excused by his age, the deliberate ignorance in which the population is kept, or his focus on the man he longs for, Boris, can only tell us:
“I began to understand the Factory. Understand that when night suddenly becomes day it is because of a mistake.”
The Factory, we learn, was “the first building they sealed off” and “it is now skeletal and in ruins…the Factory enters the ground and sinks beneath the world.” The nine hundred days of waiting referred to above began on the day of the accident, and Gausch includes pages of tally marks which count up from that nine hundred, though in the narrator’s case he is also wating for his lover. The short chapters of the novel, some headed with single word titles, are interrupted by the narrator’s letters to Boris:
“Sometimes I’m scared we’ll never see each other again, scared I risk never being happy with you again…”
Though the words are tender, the lovemaking he remembers is as violent as the land, Boris “almost choking me with his kisses…”
“He grabs me by the hair really hard and when he grips me, I think about how animals fuck…”
While the narrator writes frequently, in person they hardly speak. Do they meet rarely and in secret because the relationship is disapproved of? This is unclear, as there is a wider sense of the narrator’s existence being marginalised when even his language is degraded. His hatred of the occupation finds its focus in a soldier who visits his mother:
“The man with the shaved head is at our house again… I thought I saw mother beside him, small, as though his arrival had shrunk her.”
At first he is unfriendly, but later (encouraged by Boris – or so it seems, we never see Boris’ replies) decides to kill him, luring him into the woods where he wounds him, ties him up and leaves him. When he returns:
“His lips were pale, his clothes soaked, and he was barely moving. He didn’t say anything to me: he just looked at me.”
The cruelty of his death is in keeping with general sense of violence, but he will later discover that his impression of the man’s relationship with his mother is, once again, based on a limited understanding. In the novel’s second part, as the narrator travels with Boris, his letters are replaced by a letter his mother has written to him. As they travel, they encounter military checkpoints, servitude and companionship in a landscape which verges on the desolation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Some readers may find this novel frustrating, populated as it is not only with blank spaces on the page, but with absences in the story. It rests on the relationship between the narrator’s emotional journey and the apocalyptic landscape (and similarly between intensity and abstraction) – and I suspect that not every reader will agree on which is an echo of the other. It is, however, a novel that will leave an impression with its ferocity and its passion.
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