Glòria de Castro: “Stories used to feature blood and mutilations.”

Nina, her husband Ivan, and their son Ariel have to flee in a hurry from their apartment in the big city, due to the danger of cracks causing it to fall. They end up in the old, isolated farmhouse where she had lived as a child, near a swamp and an abandoned industrial colony, where she hadn't returned after fleeing one tragic stormy night. While living in a cramped camper van, they will have to rebuild the house and the relationship between the three of them. These are the coordinates within which Els temples solemnes (Periscopi, Lumen in Spanish), the second novel by Glòria de Castro (Caldes de Montbui, 1974), moves, which arrives three years after having won the Llibreter Prize with L'instant abans de l'impacte (Periscopi/Lumen, 2022).

The writer wanted to construct "a gothic tale that connects the destruction and reconstruction of a family in crisis: the house they live in is collapsing, like their life, and then they rebuild a very dark house that also has very dark spaces. Nina has to penetrate that darkness within herself and the house." "In life, there comes a time when we have to confront this darkness and this whole past we've fled from, even if only metaphorically," she adds about a protagonist who "has to uproot herself from the urban world to take root again in the rural world" in a dystopian time: "I'm very resistant to technology, as was evident in the previous novel, and this world with solar storms, where satellites don't work, served as an excuse for me to make cell phones disappear from the scene."

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“You're supposed to feel safe and secure within the family, but it's also where the worst violence is perpetrated,” says the author, who believes that often “the family structure that seemed so beautiful can end up being a prison, and life as a couple can become an apartment with crumbling walls.” Nevertheless, she believes in love, “even if it's reconstructed and untamed.”

While writing it—a process in which she lost a first draft when her backpack containing her notebook was stolen—De Castro was working on building her house in Mallorca, and that filtered into her writing: “In a city, everything is very civilized, whereas in the countryside, you become a bit wild, because you have to lift stones, hit things, fight with insects, thorns, brambles, and this wild side comes out.” The complex structure plays a lot with balance, like dance—Nina was a dancer, and the writer is an amateur—“I compared it to a dance troupe, because if one dancer moves forward or backward, the whole choreography falls apart. Everything is held together by a very thin thread, and at any moment, everything can become chaotic.” Dance is also the arduous pursuit of "beauty, which is disappearing and is now associated with economic acquisition or consumption, while at the same time the art world is very precarious. We create beauty and program things, yes, but when it comes down to it, it's a disaster of precariousness. The dancers themselves are conceived as bodies to create beauty, but their bodies are then wounds, contractures, and injuries."

“Beauty is now associated with economic acquisition or consumption,” says the writer.

The novel also includes literary homages, starting with Shakespeare's The Tempest – "a story based on a family nucleus, with a serious war and a war within, and some magical elements" – a text formed by the beginnings of many novels and many other literary references, such as the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales: "They contain the germ of all stories, but the originals, because today everything is sweetened and in children's books it seems that everything has to be about emotions. We are becoming idiots, whereas before in stories there was blood and mutilations."