La Conformista
Alba Dedeu
Alba Dedeu
I first discovered the recipe for pollo al ast thanks to my Catalan boyfriend. From then on, I started noticing there were more places in Barcelona dedicated exclusively to this dish than I had imagined. Do that many people really go out on Sundays to buy it? Not long after, I picked up Alba Dedeu's book La Conformista because I was intrigued by the fact that the protagonist, Eva, worked with her husband, Pere, in a shop that sold pollo al ast. From that moment on, I could only think about eating pollo al ast.
The first thing I must say is that throughout the entire book, I felt for Eva and the constant smell of frying oil that surrounded her from morning to night. At one point, my biggest nightmare became the thought of ever smelling like that. And what might seem like a trivial detail at first glance is exactly what triggers Eva's identity crisis. She tries to perfume herself, put on makeup, and wear her best high heels... but it’s all in vain because she spends every waking hour crammed into a tiny space surrounded by chickens endlessly spinning on the rotisserie. Her resignation stems from the harsh reality of her routine, and she constantly asks herself: What if my life were different?
With subtlety and a calm rhythm, the author narrates the daily life of this couple while posing almost existential questions: Did I make the right choices? Is this the life I want? Why keep going like this?
I loved the apparent ordinariness and simplicity of the story and how the protagonist just accepts the absence of passion and keeps going because, in her eyes, what else is there to do? She’s married, they have a mortgage to pay, two daughters to raise… She realizes she’s never even had the time to question her life. And when she finally does, she feels completely trapped and unrecognizable in the body of a woman without dreams or ambitions. The contrast between the mundane and the deeply introspective is what struck me most about the book.
What makes this short novel (123 pages) so special, in my opinion, is that the gray, mediocre life it portrays reflects feelings we’ve all experienced at some point. Eva sits next to her husband on a random evening and suddenly sees him as ugly, wearing those awful pool slides he uses as house shoes. She wakes up one morning to go to a business they’ve worked so humbly to build over the years and wonders, Why do I have to go? "I wanted to take the college entrance exam, study for a degree, but in the end, in the end… just chickens." She walks through her town and realizes she’s never traveled. Her life is defined by things she doesn’t even feel she consciously chose.
And yet, within this vicious circle, there are also glimmers of light. The author subtly reveals, over the course of six chapters, various time jumps and the growth of both the character and her relationships with her work and her family.
Alba writes about conformity, but more than that, she writes about life itself. At some point, we’ve all found ourselves mirrored in the same fears that Eva or Pere experience.
Note
"In the end, we let it go, staying wrapped in each other's arms in the dim light, each with a hum of secret frustrations in our heads that perhaps were very much alike."