Queer Climate Fiction by Pol Guasch: The body that decays while others talk about it

“The bees roar like a storm that drives away the beautiful weather.” A world that knows such lines is no longer in balance. There the bees live in huge swarms in the greenhouse because that is the only place where they find their livelihood. No one visiting the isolated creatures is allowed to stay longer than five minutes. Líton and Rita also have to leave as soon as they see the animals. But for a moment, time stood still for them in the bee storm.

Líton and Rita are friends and the main characters of Pol Guasch's new novel “Paradise Burns on Your Hands”. It contains many such moments in which time and space are suspended for the characters. Only through intensive dreaming do they find protection from their brutal environment, in which there are hardly any animals anymore because the earth has dried up and the forests are on fire. The only thing left behind in the unspecified climate catastrophe is the human imagination. But people are also threatened.

Líton and Rita are unlikely friends. The young man comes from the town in the valley, the young woman from a mountain settlement. Líton calls this poor place, where mining has turned the houses gray, just a “cursed spot of earth.” The two friends agree not to talk about Rita's origins anymore. Both are united in the belief that the dark past can be defeated through silence.

Líton also knows suffering. He is infected with a mysterious deadly virus that occurs among gay men. Right at the beginning of the story he announces: “If someone ever comes to you and advises you not to grow up too quickly because strength and beauty disappear too quickly, then you should know that he is right.” Líton has to watch helplessly as his body deteriorates while the others talk about him. The brutal experience of the AIDS pandemic. Only being together with Rita comforts him.

However, the rest of the book does not read quite as pessimistically as the opening. In general, the second novel by the Spanish poet and storyteller has no clear stance or perspective, and certainly no continuous plot. As with the grand masters of modernism Alfred Döblin, James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon, the plot of Guasch's experimental novel is divided into many perspectives and styles.

In addition to Líton and Rita, the narrators who have their say include the women from the mountain settlement, Líton's lover René and the objects that Líton collects in a personal altarpiece, including the ticket to the disco where he met Rita. At one point, Rita's diary also speaks, which is full of crossed-out passages but also intimate revelations. In a later chapter, the perspectives of various characters in the village slide into one another, like in the famous Irrfelsen chapter of Joyce's "Ulysses", in which an entire city of Dublin begins to tell its story. Here it is a village in the middle of climate collapse.

In the taz interview, Pol Gausch describes his novel as an “emotional landscape” that emerges from different perspectives. But that is precisely what makes it difficult for readers to understand the characters' feelings. Many encounters, such as the Lítons and Ritas in the greenhouse, are overlaid by imagination and memories and are therefore abstract: “White sparks, sighs, fatigue and sweat, love, life suddenly falling into pieces, time standing still.” It is not clear whether the characters still speak and feel or whether it is the language that develops a life of its own. This is fascinating and frustrating.

After all: Pol Guasch's novel can afford the mystery. Ultimately, the allusions are very clear: fires and drought refer to the climate catastrophe, Líton's mysterious illness refers to the AIDS pandemic, which, however, seems somewhat anachronistic in the Central European setting. Most recently, Julia Ducournau created a similarly unreal portrait of the virus with her dystopian film “Alpha”.

As Guasch reveals in the interview, he wanted to tell the AIDS pandemic through the relationship between the sick Líton and his girlfriend Rita. The two do not form a classic couple; their deep bond does not require sexuality. The friends form a natural chosen family, “like the turtles that sat so close together that you could hardly tell them apart.”

When Pol Guasch wrote the novel a few years ago, the original was published in 2024, he definitely didn't want to write “Cli-Fi”, climate fiction. The focus was on the story of the two friends. The big forest fires in Canada and Greece, but also the rainless months in Europe, finally inspired him to do it. The intimate relationship and the global catastrophe should be intertwined.

Pol Guasch: “Paradise burns on your hands”. Translation from Catalan Kirsten Brandt. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2026, 180 pages, 22 euros

However, all the topics do not come together very convincingly in just 180 pages. A lot of things seem asserted and sketchy, the jumpy plot with its many perspectives makes access even more difficult. This leaves little room for the feelings of the characters who are actually at the center of the plot.

Individual scenes in which Guasch evokes the intimacy of interpersonal relationships with a certain pathos still remain in memory. For example, when you get to know the two main characters: "Líton doesn't stop smiling, and you dance without forgetting the space that you have created and that keeps opening up, getting more and more dense, like a diamond in the rough that your eyes are polishing."

By the way, there is no better description for the novel: it is a diamond in the rough that is only polished by the looks of the reader. A challenge or invitation, however you take it.