Napalm in the Heart
One pair of hands shoots a soldier in the forest, saws a grandfather apart in the garden, and carries a mother's body across a border to bury her. The letters promise a lover's return.
243 pages · Hardcover · Faber & Faber, 2024
Bury, Burn, Carry
Pol Guasch's Napalm in the Heart opens with a soldier eating breakfast at a family's kitchen table and closes with a young man searching an empty campground for the lover the whole book has been addressing.
Between those two points the novel treats the body, human and animal, as the only material left to argue with: butchered for the soil, shot at a lover's instruction, driven across a border for days before it can finally be set down. The letters that frame the story promise presence. The plot spends itself proving the opposite.
The book alternates between narrated present and broken letters to Boris, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem in a prose that keeps its register even at its most anatomical. The letters withhold as much as they confess. Early on the narrator adopts a near-silent voice, audible only to those who listen closely, training the reader into the same discipline the occupation demands of him.
Domestic safety in the novel is bought through smallness. A soldier sits at the kitchen table delivering pensions and lies. The mother shrinks beside him, nodding through a meal she does not believe. But the son does not stay where compliance leaves him. When Boris asks for proof of loyalty, the narrator lures that same soldier into the forest and shoots him twice at close range, ties him as instructed and leaves him for the wolves. The letter reporting it back is written in triumph, not confession. The novel offers no vantage point from which to separate the act from the love that produced it. Proof of loyalty and an act of torture are the same gesture, performed by the same hands that will soon take a saw to a body in the garden.
The grandfather's death asks those hands for a different labour. A state ban on burial and a body that will not keep force the family to saw him apart in the garden. As the blade meets bone, memory surfaces only through resistance: the wrist bones giving way, the calf bone screeching under the saw. His mother tells him "you've been good" as he scatters the pieces through the furrows. The line carries more than a paragraph of commentary could. This is not a hidden act. It is an approved one, instruction passed directly between parent and child.
The mother's own loss runs underneath all of it. She speaks a tongue that was forced out of her, and writes her final letter in the language that replaced it, explaining to her son how the first one was taken. Han Kang's Greek Lessons turns on a woman who loses speech from within, a private withdrawal into silence. Guasch's mother loses hers from without. The silence is confiscation, not retreat, and the son inherits the gap as the condition of his own muffled voice.
The intimacy with Boris runs on instability and knows it. They meet in an abandoned rat room, undress separately, speak little, and part without security. Greenwell's What Belongs to You builds desire on social and transactional risk, a lover who cannot be possessed because the terms forbid it. Here the precarity is wartime, not social. Boris cannot be held because the world is ending, and the novel keeps that fact in view every time the two bodies meet.
The book refuses to let escape be relief. The narrator flees with Boris and is held at a border farm, set to unpaid labour under dogs and armed men, alongside two brothers attempting the same crossing. The searchlight escape costs the elder brother his life at the wall. The novel arranges the flight so that getting out demands the same currency staying in did: a body spent for another body's passage.
Burial is the book's most withheld act. The mother's body rides in the back seat for days, flesh giving way to fungus, while the narrator drives toward no fixed destination. Guasch holds the ground open for nearly the whole second half before letting it close at a desert campground. The delay is the point. A family that has lost its house, its language and its address is granted one ceremony, and only once everything that gave a grave meaning is already gone.
The same campground is where Boris goes missing. The narrator searches the toilets, the showers, the parked cars. He finds nothing. Napalm in the Heart spends most of its length training its narrator, and its reader, to read absence as instruction. Then it withdraws the one presence the letters were written to keep
★★★★★
Editorial