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Fiction

Dragona

By Xavier Queipo

About this book

In current Galician writing, Xavier Queipo is one of the authors that better uses the principle Research + Development + (literary) Innovation. In Dragona he presents a “character novel”. In a sewage city named by the author “The city of sewage”, the lives of a series of atypical characters develop. These people have come from the four corners of the world and they wander in desperation and discomfort, between futile behaviours and primary instincts. Dragona is a novel with a soundtrack and a recreation of a territory not widely analysed in Galician literature, that of analysing with a surgeon-like precision, feelings and passions as if they were sewn to a single body. This novel is a turning point for the author in his constant search for what is not visible, in those surges of uncertainty in what Cortázar used to call “the other side”. Dragona is a parable of the future that is waiting there, that is there, that is coming.

Book fragment

Dragona used to reconstruct the place, immediately analyse the situation, dissect the attitudes and social behaviours as she understood them, with her glasses to see the inside. Marooned. The three of them had been marooned by a hypocritical society where nobody was what they pretended to be, where nobody was what they wanted to be, where everyone travelled in the dark, without any direction or compass, led by vague currents, by winds that carried the sand from the desert, by tropical cyclones and the treacherous summer storms in the mountains. Nobody had taught her the inaccuracy of the world, nobody had told her that everything was going to be so difficult and so despairing and routine-like, so little in her own hands and so predetermined by an undecipherable and magical fate. Maybe somebody had told her when she was a teenager, or when she was a child, or maybe yesterday, but she was not aware of having listened to it, deaf on purpose to the dire warnings of her elders, desperate and sad people. Now it was she who was desperate for not answering calls, for disregarding the alarm signals, for her excesses in optimism, but it was late now, boredom was there itself, installed, like sticky jelly, like a crushing stone, like the announcement of the future being carried in its bags.