ANAGRAMA NOVEL PRIZE 2021

An award-winning, breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch’s debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m writing down the future. I tell myself that, in the face of misunderstanding, the words should be there. Someone, maybe, will understand them,” says the narrator of the story. And, in fact, Napalm in Our Hearts is something of an exercise in the intimate understanding of an extreme and traumatic past, and the sentimental mapping of a tumultuous present in the search for some kind of freedom.

Set in an ambiguous geography, Pol Guasch’s first novel features a pair of boys who have grown up in a militarized zone. Their lives have been impacted by precarious living conditions, an environment that is intolerant of their desire, and families that have been uprooted. The lack of prospects is pervasive, but they hang on to the possibility of letting themselves be dazzled and even submitting, of embracing militancy and the temptation of violence, and of continuing to speak a language that is falling to pieces: their own.

The only alternative is to flee that barren land. On their journey beyond the “other side”, literally carrying the weight of the past in the form of a letter and a dead body to bury, they’ll find different answers to shared mysteries. Pieced together delicately like a mosaic, written with precision and beauty, Napalm in Our Hearts offers a vivid allegory of the various oppressions that determine so many lives, but also of the fine line that sometimes separates victim from executioner.

According to the 2021 Anagrama Novel Prize jury:

«The voice that speaks to us from Napalm in Our Hearts, innocent and brutal at the same time, like the boy from ‘La guerra’ by Carner and the teenager from Quanta, quanta guerra... by Rodoreda, drops us into the middle of the terrifying forest of children’s stories and into the human condition. It is one of those novels that, as Kafka said, affects us like a disaster and helps us break open the frozen sea within us»  (Mita Casacuberta).

«“Pol Guasch took on the dystopian genre from a poet’s perspective and came up with a suggestive post-nuclear novel set in the most marginal of margins. Napalm in Our Hearts (…) will captivate the reader with a surprising combination: the sense of suffocation that dominates the world he describes and the voluptuous language he uses in those descriptions» (Guillem Gisbert).

And the critics said:

«Written in lyrical, if brutal, fragments, this dystopian novel takes place in an unnamed country riven by military strife and environmental disaster. Its narrator, a young man who lives in the forest with his mother, sustains himself by writing letters to his city-dwelling boyfriend. But, following a violent confrontation with a soldier, the young man embarks on a harrowing drive across a post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering mercenaries and desperate refugees along the way. If Guasch’s formally inventive approach can sometimes risk murkiness, the beauty of his prose shores up his story, in which language, love, family, and home are in constant peril.» (The New Yorker)

«Pol Guasch’s debut novel, translated into electrifying English by Mara Faye Lethem . . . is written as a mosaic of short pieces in different modes: memoir, letters, poetry, poetic prose, photographs, which draw on different genres, including science fiction, adventure, horror and romance. These are skilfully composed, cohering into a lucent, compelling narrative that shares a sensibility and atmosphere with one of the greatest Catalan novels, Mercè Rodoreda’s tenebrous beauty Death in Spring . . .  This profoundly strange and beautiful, formally bold and lyrically elevated novel gives the reader compelling storytelling and a space in which to think about love, freedom and survival, and a future to which we might be heading.» (The Guardian).

«I read Napalm al cor by the young Pol Guasch, winner of the Anagrama Prize, in a weekend. It is a book that is as strange as it is fascinating, grand poetry turned into prose. Highly recommended for its enormous sensibility and great literary solidity» (Jordi Basté, La Vanguardia).

«A poetic story, raw, brutal...At the heart of the novel lies a solid political discourse that is not ambiguous in the slightest» (Ot Bou Costa, Vilaweb).

«Napalm al cor proposes very tough approches and fragmented linearity...In philosophical terms, we could say that it is an exercise in humanistic critique» (Gerard E. Our, Núvol).

«With images of devastation, Pol Guasch debuts as a novelist with a dysptopia about climate collapse, the body, and language. Napalm al cor is a book about family grief, about the passion and love between men. About the need for love that drives the protagonist to dive deep into himself» (Julià Guillamon, La Vanguardia).

«Pol Guasch is one of the prodigal young people of our literary universe. (…) A novel that comes to life with poetic prose and a dystopian aesthetic and becomes one of the referential titles of Catalan literature of the early 21st century. You still haven’t read it?» (Oriol Rodríguez, El Nacional—Revers).

«Presented as a remote science fiction story in a post-human time, this allegory not only reflects on the dynamics of power, but also on the weight of legacy—made out of misery, of course, but also incandescent desire. (…) Guasch’s language is contemporary, sparkling, capable of describing the nuances of reality with an inner light. Prose that overflows with the sensibility of a poet-author» (Valèria Gaillard, El Periódico) .

«This is the first novel by the writer from Tarragona. A well-crafted story where Guasch presents us with a dystopia about repression starring a pair of boys who try to flee from a militarized zone that represents a reality that is highly intolerable» (Antonio Lucas & Luis Alemany, 30 Best Books of 2021, El Mundo).

«Guasch, who has already published a few poetry collections, explains that he approaches literature in the same way: from a place of joy and pleasure. [Pol Guasch] is of the opinion that literature should not appease readers with answers, but rather accompany them. For this novel, he wanted to create a novelistic form that served to structure Napalm al cor, but that he isn’t sure will live beyond this novel» (Rac 1) .

«Only 24 years old and with a couple of published poetry collections, Guasch is the youngest author to win the Llibres Anagrama Prize, a wise award when it comes to launching new talent. Napalm al cor is a simultaneously suffocating and poetic dystopia about the repression of power in a militarized zone where two boys suffer from a lack of tolerance for their desires and language, from instability, and from uprooting» (Elena Hevia, El Periódico).

«There may be no hope for the rules of men, but there is hope for life and its unbreakable natural cycles. And these characters cling to them when they need to in order to survive, with animalistic instincts that Guasch, little by little, consecrates... Readers enter an imprecise spiritual dimension where barbarism and love are ultimately almost inseparable (…) Napalm is a war fuel that explodes intensely, that burns slowly (…) and then, in the midst of the apparent stillness—which is not really stillness but rather apnea—begins a major synesthetic celebration that both softens and emphasizes the constant brutality of the work. That’s when the novelist shows us that he is, above all else, a poet» (Mònica Boixader, Núvol).

«Napalm al cor is a novel written with intelligence and sensibility. The story it tells is as distressing as it is seductive (what is it about ruins that makes us feel so drawn to them?)… One of the things that makes the novel work is that readers can, in some way, feel like they’re in the epicenter of this abandonment. Or, at the very least, it’s easy for them to feel the protagonist’s existential drama. After all, we’ve all fed into our internal dystopias at one moment for another so we can strengthen the feeling of wanting to escape them. Novels like Napalm al cor make Catalan literature a little greater» (Manel Haro, Llegir.cat). 

«Beyond the dystopian elements, Napalm al cor is a novel that centers on the effects of the disintegration of a family (…) But the novel is, above all, a passionate story of love and desire between the protagonist and his lover Boris, a relationship that moves between the dreamlike and the delirium of fleeing beyond the border told through the things they share with each other and a series of lyrical letters. Their emotion certainly does not measure up to the explosive strength of the catastrophic reality in which it develops»  (Ponç Puigdevall, El País—Quadern). 

«Guasch makes his English-language debut with this starkly beautiful postapocalyptic novel. The narrator ekes out an existence with his ailing mother, who used to work at a malevolent place called the Factory and is now “devoid of hope,” in their wilderness refuge, where armed men hunt wild boars and police one another’s movements. As a way to combat the ever-present “muteness of the dead,” the narrator writes letters to his beloved, a photographer named Boris, confessing his feelings for Boris and expressing his distaste for their paramilitary society. After the narrator attacks another man out of fear for his own life, he flees, leaving behind his mother and reuniting with Boris. Together they join the ranks of survivors in makeshift settlements and attempt to evade an insurgent army that regularly carries out disappearances and interrogations. The fractured narrative, which unfolds like a series of prose poems, is intercut with Boris’s abstract photographs, offering a record of their exodus and adding to the jagged testament to queer love. This is arresting» (Publishers Weekly).

"Napalm in the Heart is, at its heart, a poet’s novel – for better, not for worse. Brimming with energy, what buoys it are clever ideas and some beautiful turns of phrase, deftly translated from the Catalan by Maya Faye Lethem. During his travels with Boris, for instance, the narrator reflects on the fragility of his existence: ‘Speaking: reviving a dying language. Living: resisting the gusts of wind. And loving, for me: nearing a body equal to mine without knowing if it is poison or syrup. And it is always poison.’ This is a moving manifestation of Guasch’s central question: whether individuals can withstand a ruined world, and revive for themselves traces of what has been lost. There is syrup to be found here – for those able to stomach the poisons along the way.’ (Telegraph, 4 stars****)