Killing the Nerve by Anne Pazos

Catalan Non-fiction

Original title – Matar El Nervi

Translators -Laura McGloughlin and Charlotte Coombe

Source – Subscription edition

I have said before that one of my favourite publishers that have appeared in recent years is Foundry editions of all the books that they have published I haven’t disliked a single one I have read, and this is a piece of Auto Journalism from  Catalan writer Anna Pavos, it follows her twentiers where she did what a lot of young peiople did and take on the digiatl nomads world of working around the world. How people run away to escape their own world is something I can relate to. I also worked abroad in my youth. But not as many places as Anna does. Anna Pazos captures several moments and also what it is like to feel rootless at times.

For a while I was one of those people who talked about Thessaloniki with that fanatical glint. I defended and praised the city as if it were a lost Arcadia. In my case, the deception was particularly perverse because I knew deep down that I’d been unhappy there, with an overwhelming, rootless misery like I’d never known. But my urge to be the kind of person who enjoys and reveres Thessaloniki was more powerful than the memory of my failure. The reasons for the defeat were concrete and shameful, and they had to be masked by an objective knowledge of the history and particular circumstances of the city. I tried, unsuccessfully, to protect myself with a biblio-graphie shield to deal with my failure, as we so often do in life.

Her time in Greece

The book begins when she has the chance to study in Thessaloniki as an Erasmus student. AS the book opens, she recounts that this was the last time she had a fever years before the pandemic in a cheap room she rented. What comes across is a typical late teen experience of drinking, trying to avoid falling pregnant, as she mixed with the other students. Through them, she has her eyes open as they come from around Europe. The n because she can write, she ends up in Israel, where she views the conflict and gains insight, but, like many, finds the whole thing maybe too much at times. She then wanders Europe for a while. She then gets a boat to America and arrives just as the MeToo movement is gaining momentum. Eventually end back home viewing her home of Barcelona differently than she did as Covid is about to hit. All this, and she looks back at her family life along the way.

Rumour has it that Roiphe is writing an incendiary essay for Harper’s Magazine. In it, she not only questions the strange energy taking over the #MeToo era, she also reveals the name of the woman who created a spreadsheet for female workers in the media world to anonymously report their male co-workers.

The spreadsheet, which has been circulating for a while now, gathers details of various types of aggression, from a disagreeable encounter over drinks to inappropriate touching at work or sexual harassment. Once the accused’s name is added to the list, his offence is on the same level as all the others. It’s all now perceived as part of a continuum, outpourings of the same unbridled misogyny we’ve agreed to call “rape culture”

Anna was there when the Metoo movement broke

There is a reason we want to run. That is at the heart of Outrun and books like Wild. Part of this is explained in the book why Anna feels trapped in Barcelona. I get it, I had family problems and a drive to escape where I was from, and when that door opened, I took it and lived in Germany for a few years. But she also captures the nomadic nature of a lot of young lives. There is a way that many young people can have access to more places and opportunities to see them than before. That is what she has caught the new digital nomad world from Greece, partly through Israel and the US, and back home. I’m not sure why this has been seen less than the other Foundry books. For me, this is the other side of some of the fiction books I have reviewed in the last year. Perfection or a Little Dinner both deal with the modern world of the 21st century, and this is a 21st-century account of one woman’s travels and views. Have you read this book? Or a non-fiction work that captures the digital nomad life of travelling here and there!