No 11
Catalina Aguilar Mastretta
After ten years, María and Emiliano decide to end their relationship. So she moves into a new apartment, with a new bed and new sheets. And still, everything smells of him. It is particularly heartbreaking to be sucker-punched by the smell of the past. Todos los días son nuestros (2016) by Catalina Aguilar Mastretta is a story about the end of love. María’s voice takes us through the shards of a broken bond, the nostalgia over what’s been lost, the all too slow stages of grief, that “condition impossible to cheat”(Barthes, 2009). Catalina’s writing leaves us disarmed because it manages to distill something of the unexpected paths that burst forth once we put certitude in a drawer and throw away the key. Without heavenly prowess, nor the pretense of a one-of-a-kind perspective, she writes about the things our private worlds are made of, with a spontaneity, a freshness, that is as delicate as unusual. It takes shape in the way María addresses her vulnerable state — slightly laughing at her own clichés, in the way her comments on films, filled with verve, splash the pages with love, and in the magnificent repertoire of secondary characters: a boss who deems marriage winning over passion in Casablanca a happy ending, a little girl who makes a case for Cinderella’s feminism, a bunch of fabulous friends. A warm, unpretentious book, a refuge, a cup of tea.
