Napalm in the Heart

“Napalm in the Heart is a powerful sensory and emotional experience.”

Originally published in Spain in 2021, Napalm in the Heart is Catalan poet Pol Guasch’s first novel. It has already won prestigious literary awards and been translated into a number of languages. Now we have an English translation that matches Guasch’s dreamlike vision and elegant prose poetry.

Napalm in the Heart is comprised of fragments: short chapters often less than a page in length, that seem like journal entries; letters our nameless protagonist has written to his lover, Boris: and excerpts from a letter our narrator’s mother wrote him before her death. They tell a grim, frightening tale of survival in a dystopian landscape, relieved only by the protagonist’s description of his love for Boris. While this novel takes place in some unspecified future, there are echoes of Catalonia’s past. The survivors are no longer allowed to speak their original language but must “speak the language they wanted us to speak.” Speaking one’s native tongue is a dangerous act of resistance.

Before the novel begins, there was an explosion at The Factory that wiped out much of humankind. The Factory was the place of employment for everyone in the area. Over the entrance was the word “Purity,” an echo of the moralistic, Fascist regime of Francisco Franco. It seems that The Factory was fueled by an influx of people through an entrance hidden in the forest: “Through that door entered the fuel, so to speak, which wasn’t liquid or black, or sticky: it was files of people who flowed into the place without knowing where they were being led.”  Was this some kind of extermination camp?

After the explosion, few humans remain. Animals reclaim much of the landscape. The country seems to be run by thugs with shaved heads. Death, sometimes violent, seems omnipresent. When his grandfather dies, our protagonist cuts up his body and leaves pieces of it around the garden as fertilizer and food for animals. When after his father’s suicide, his mother takes up with one of the thugs, the protagonist stabs him and ties him up outdoors so that he will be devoured by animals. Boris’s parents were murdered.

After his mother dies, the protagonist places her corpse in the back seat as they try to escape the country. The decomposing corpse represents the shame his mother and others have instilled in him about his homosexuality: “We’ve been apprehended by her spectral rictus that had survived guilt and judgment, and had left open forever, the possibility that she could get up, frozen and white, and point at us, again, with her finger.”

On their drive north, the protagonist and Boris encounter bands of people, some violent, some benevolent. For a while, the two boys are forced into slave labor. Later, on the other side of the border, the meet a friendlier group.

The only redeeming force is the possibility of love. Our protagonist writes Boris, “I offer you my heart so you can enter it, and set up your furniture inside, and make it yours: it’s muscled walls are for you.” Yet these two young men don’t seem to be compatible. Boris is a photographer, stingy with words, but obsessed with creating pictures that freeze time. His photographs are interspersed throughout the novel (hazily reproduced in the paperback version). We never see the letters Boris writes, nor does he say much when the young men are together. Language is everything to our narrator who holds on to experience through his words.

Yet can one control one’s life in this chaotic world? Can one escape one’s repressive surroundings? What is the point of the journey the young men take? Some of what they need to escape is within, not without—particularly the guilt they have inherited from their parents. The answer comes in part from the impassioned, defiant letter the mother writes as her parting gift to her son, “my son, the fire is always inside: like napalm in the heart.

There are all sorts of ways to interpret Napalm in the Heart. One could read the book literally, but it is more interesting to read it symbolically, as a surreal interior landscape our narrator must travel through to find himself. However one reads it, Napalm in the Heart is a powerful sensory and emotional experience.