Isn’t it great to be free of any duty and obligation that you haven’t freely chosen? Not to have to follow a course of action because of your biological sex, nationality, or social class? Not to be obligated to follow a certain set of behaviors imposed by unchosen religious dogma and familial or societal expectations? Isn’t it great to wake up every day and know that you can take the day in absolutely any direction of your choice and nobody will have as much as a timid criticism to make?
There are people, a small minority, for whom this is, indeed, wonderful. They will calmly reject the daily gift of freedom and step into their duties and obligations without any external motivator. But for most people, freedom from others and freedom from externally imposed constraints, is poison.
I’m reading Sara Barquinero’s novel, Escorpiones, and that is exactly what it is about. Some of her characters are very young, others are middle-aged, but they’re all falling apart because of freedom. They try to hide from the horror of nothingness, which is what freedom is for most people. They hide from it in drug addiction, conspiracy theories, depression, transgenderism, and suicidal fantasies. They are endlessly self-destructive because the self that exists without severe constraints becomes an intolerable, suppurating boil for its bearer.
The novel is almost 1,000 pages long and very overwritten. I understand, though, why the author and the editors allowed the repetitive parts to stay in the book. Without them, you don’t fully feel the horror of the lives of these characters who are trapped in unbroken, purposeless, and seemingly inexplicable misery.
Barquinero is very talented. Her novel offers the best explanation of transgenderism that I read anywhere in fiction. She isn’t getting canceled for it solely because the people who would do such a thing are unable to plow through a thousand pages of literary text.
This is a young author, and already I’m seeing a second outstanding novel from her. The two books are extremely different in what concerns style and structure. But both are about freedom as nothingness. If you read either novel, ask yourself what UBI will do to the people depicted in it, which is the majority of people. And okay, you’re not one of them. You’re highly organized and self-motivated. Yippee. But what about everybody else? What will this do to them?
Sara Barquinero correctly concludes that it will be nothing good.
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