Barcelona Metropolis

Javier Pérez Andújar’s latest novel, El año del Búfalo [The Year of the Buffalo], is an astronomical novel because it is the work of someone who has spent years taking steps to reach the conclusion that we live in a black hole. And it is too because it is a brochure of infinite universes: characters, places, times and historical events.

According to the Chinese horoscope, the Year of the Buffalo comes around every 12 years, but the latest novel by the Barcelona writer Javier Pérez Andújar, which takes this ephemeris as its title, is a unique and unrepeatable phenomenon. The book suggests publishing the posthumous manuscript of Folke Ingo, a Finnish communist who dreams of being Spanish. This is the main thread of El año del Búfalo, published by Anagrama, but endless parallel plots shall emerge from this novel’s footnotes that the author calls psychophonies.

El año del Búfalo is an astronomical novel, in the initial sense, because it is the work of someone who has spent years taking steps (books bursting with notes, in his case) to reach the conclusion that we live in a black hole. And it is also astronomical in a second sense, because it is a brochure of infinite universes: characters, places, times and historical events.

The writer gives us the gift of a cosmogony, his own – although El año del Búfalo owes a great deal to astrology and even parapsychology –, because Javier Pérez Andújar always writes from the losing side. In the midst of the novel, we read “writing is magic”, and the fact is that the words of the author of Catalanes todos [We Are All Catalan] are a spell against the times that pass without anyone acknowledging or remembering them.

The book swings a punch at forgetfulness from the footnotes: the poor relation, the scorned line of any text, the loose end that the main story doesn’t tie up. And, in this surreptitious way, the textual ants at the bottom of the page end up stealing the limelight from the anaemic writing that Wikipedia emulates, where the author explains the oil crisis, the Carrero Blanco attack or the creation of the Polisario Front, all events that occurred in the year of the buffalo. These stories, disguised as encyclopaedia entries, are called psychophonies, because everyone knows that parapsychology is the science that believes in supernatural phenomena and because the author wants to show us that what takes place in the great beyond has a lot to do with what is happening around the corner. The French poet Paul Éluard posited that “there is another world, but it is in this one”, and this is what the writer seeks to show us throughout the book.