Catalan writer and artist Irene Solà’s debut novel, The embankment, despite its age—the Catalan original dates back to 2017—arrives in Italy with a surprisingly intact and original charm.
Nothing in this novel is linear: the story unfolds through small, intimate episodes, a mosaic of intertwined narratives and tales, in which writing itself becomes the thread that ties together characters, old loves, eccentric families, places, and memories. At the center of the novel is Ada, who has returned to her fictional hometown of Sorrabonica after several years in London. A return that is not only geographical, but existential: Ada longs to “start writing” and recount the small rural world from which she comes, the family traditions, friends, superstitions, and figures who seem to have emerged as much from the protagonist’s memory as from her imagination as a writer.
The strength of The embankment lies precisely in this intertwined alternation between reality and fiction. The stories Ada constructs—from the marten hiding on the rooftops to the tales of the catfish in the swamp, from Samantha the cow to Roser’s bizarre acquaintances—are not merely maternal anecdotes, but elements of a narrative universe that rediscovers and loses itself, that discovers itself and reconnects with the people who inhabit it.
Solà doesn’t rely on a rigid plot or a conventional structure: rather, she constructs a magical language that investigates, explores, and is carried away by the pleasure of narrating what is and what isn’t, right up to what we wish were. Magical realism? I think the author comes very close, and at times it seems as if Márquez is populating the page: Solà’s writing is capable of giving voice to everyday stories and folklore with equal intensity. The novel’s timeline, too, never proceeds straight, but unfolds in continuous flashes of memories and visions: the recalled past blends with the present, Ada’s writing is reflected in the overall narrative, and each character seems both protagonist and spectator of their own story. A stunning chaos to lose yourself in. Ada herself intertwines her story with that of the author Solà, creating a new connection with reality. The resulting sensation is that of an eternal return of time, of a bubble in which fantasy and memory chase each other without ever losing each other, where everything floats. While at times the multiplicity of episodes and digressions can give the impression of a narrative that—to use Sorrentino’s words—is “disunited,” it is precisely this structure that makes L’argine a novel of rare complexity: a text that doesn’t just tell a story, but a way of looking at and describing the world.
At the heart of it all is Solà’s ability to make us feel close to the characters—to their choices, their affections, their small melancholies—and to show how writing can become a mirror of an entire familiar and human universe, made up of relationships that seem simple but, in their spontaneity, contain an entire geography of meaning. One of my favorite lines from the novel sums it up perfectly:
And you were not the beginning, nor were you the end. You were the gaze, you, little boy. The gaze, under which all things exist. L’argine enchants not with spectacular effects, but with its poetics of everyday life, with its attention to language, and with the enchanting sensitivity with which it observes the unfolding of human lives, making every small adventure narratively extraordinary.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Irene Solà, L’argine, Mondadori, Milano, 2025
Original edition: Els dics, Barcelona, L’Altra editorial, 2018