They knocked at the door and, without saying a word, a fleeting and quick messenger – I noticed the Christian symbol in the shape of a fish hanging from his neck – handed me A forestthe new novel by Jean-Yves Jouannais. The author himself sent it and I was surprised that its plot was related to Why do they do this?my column of Tuesday 25 of last month in these same pages, which spoke of The birdsby Hitchcock, and the attacks of these birds on humans, as well as “the terrifying threat that awaits us” and that at the time of writing these lines, I identify with the synchronized spectacle of a flock of starlings that I saw flying last week in the sky of Tarragona.
It was to conclude the reading of A forest and confirm that the novel met all the conditions to give continuity to what, with humor, we could call my “bird state” of recent days. The achievement of this state was influenced by the news that, in a double Catalan and Spanish edition, the 1922 classic was published. Friends of ocells (My Bird Friends), by Josep María de Sagarra. “The book appears at a very feathery moment: I have been observing hawks soaring in the city sky for days,” wrote Jacinto Antón.
A forest The story takes place in 1947, after World War II, in the devastated German city of Bremen. And he recounts how Lenz, a lawyer and American army captain charged with “denazifying” German public spaces, was given a very special case: what to do with a group of talking birds, starlings that nest in a local forest and have learned to sing Nazi anthems that they pass on to their young?
Lenz faces a legal and moral dilemma: should he defend these birds and prove that they are not fervent Nazis, or eradicate them to cleanse public life of all traces of the fallen regime? He does not let himself be intimidated by the dilemma (so current) and explores in depth the complex questions linked to collective guilt and the resilience of ideologies. It’s as if Lenz understood that devoting himself to such a dilemma could be a fun occupation and always preferable to boredom.
Speaking of boredom, last week at the Imperial Tarraco I stuck it out by remembering that in 1890 the British Eugene Schieffelin moved 100 starlings from London to Central Park in New York, which would have ended up making these birds an invasive species that still causes environmental damage in North America, and also here, where some of us believe we saw flocks of starlings that on their return journey in Europe, seem complicit in the “terrifying threat” that stalks us so much. And who knows if they do not encourage us to feel like subjects of this Roman Empire in decline in which, according to Philip. K. Dick, we all still live. Something which, if it were true, would explain our condition as captives of Evil, with all this delirious succession of Roman emperors and other imperial birds, with so many madmen, on both sides of the Atlantic, all capable of a different absurdity every day.
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