El tigre
Borja Vilallonga
An Adventure of the Spirit under the Yoke of Modernity—The Literary Debut of Borja Vilallonga
The comfort of family wealth has provided Hadrian a world of certainties and a predetermined future. But Hadrian wants more and searches. This quest is transformed after his father’s suicide, which destroys his family and the world of certainties. As a result, Hadrian embarks on a journey full of adventures of the Spirit. Yet, trauma has also brought forth the ghosts of mental health. Our protagonist breaks from society and flees the tyranny of materialism, capitalism, hedonism, and lastly, the empty and absurd nihilism of our time. Ultimately, Hadrian has to face the tiger of the modern world and decide whether he risks riding it.
El tigre | by Borja Vilallonga | Editorial Empúries | 336 pp. | 21.90€ | ISBN: 978-84-19729-53-8
Why El tigre
A novel is a link of stories, emotions and men that preceded us. The accumulation of these links breeds civilization. Literature simultaneously explains and builds these links. In our civilization, we know that this tradition of stories isn’t the truth: these stories are the fantastic creation by a succession of great men. However, these stories become a faithful reflection of the truth of the world we forge and we bring forth. This truth is inseparable from the aesthetic higher mission that both literature and civilization herald. In every civilization, despite what has been said, beauty celebrates itself in the practice of art and the royal art. This magnum opus, created and imagined, sustained by the divine, is what makes possible the true life of the standing man.
El tigre explains a story—or perhaps two—in order to understand what happens when the entire edifice of civilization and its tradition crumbles. It does so while restoring the lost civilizational links—through the adventures of Hadrian, an homage to Mercè Rodoreda’s character Adrià in Quanta, quanta guerra… Hadrian represents man under the yoke of modernity, as he was understood by Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola or Ezra Pound. Together with Hadrian, the reader will turn the world of material existence upside down; he will go down into the past in order to bring it to the present and relaunch it to the future—like an avant-garde of the reintegrated world to come… El tigre is another link in this long tradition of stories, emotions and men, while celebrating the aesthetic higher mission of art for the sake of art in literature.