Marisa, the main character of Beatriz Serrano's bestseller El descontento (Unhappiness), is a woman in her thirties who detests her mid-level managerial job in PR. Marisa has no friends, children, family, or hobbies. All that she has in lieu of a personal life is occasional sex with a neighbor. Her only pastime consists of hating her job which she does with the intensity of a person whose middle age is barren of any other interest.
The reason why Marisa hates her job is not that she wants a better or a different one. She wants no job at all. Her goal in life is to do absolutely nothing except eat, take drugs and watch YouTube. Unsurprisingly, Marisa is very left-wing and believes that she is prevented from achieving the lifestyle of her dreams by a heteropatriarchal conspiracy.
There are two categories of people Marisa despises most of all: people who like their jobs and mothers. Mothers who work and enjoy both motherhood and professional endeavors disgust her in the extreme. Her role model is Elena, a friend from back in college who had surgery to sew on a fake pair of breasts and a plastic butt and is successfully prostituting herself. Elena, of course, is also very left-wing and joins Marisa in despising work and procreation as un-feminist pursuits.
The way I'm retelling this novel you might think the author was trying to mock the vapid Marisas and the whorish Elenas of the world. But no, the mockery is mine alone. Serrano is clearly on Marisa's side but she's a talented author and her own novel escapes from her control by page 3. As a result, the book is a delicious indictment of this type of person instead of Serrano's intended criticism of the evil capitalist system that terribly abuses people by not providing them free luxury.
I've heard an argument that UBI exists precisely for people like Marisa. Why should we make a person work if she really doesn't want to? ask UBI proponents. If she wants to sit at home and do nothing but eat pills and watch YouTube, surely we can afford, as a wealthy society, to feed and house such people.
The problem with UBI for Marisa-types is that they aren't content with a pittance. Marisa likes beach vacations, oysters, expensive cheeses, oceans of booze, and designer drugs. It would cost a packet to keep Marisas in the style they believe they deserve.
But that's not even the biggest problem. The real issue is the source of Marisa-ism. Where do such people come from? What causes them to conceive the extraordinary belief that any effort or obligation is an intolerable insult? Marisa explains this very clearly. Life, she says, is about feeling happy. Any situations that aren't filled with extreme joy rob you of life. Death - or a drug-induced stupor if you can't find the strength to kill yourself - is preferable to an existence where other people expect you to do something.
At some point, Marisa received or developed a series of beliefs about life that turned her into a cripple. First, she is crippled psychologically and, by the end of the novel, physically. Her life is terrible, and not because I say so but because how she perceives it. Hers is a wasted life at every level.
Spanish literature has this favorite character type called "la beata." Beatas are extremely religious women who pray constantly and go to Mass twice a day for decades. It's customary to mock the beatas and, yes, their lives did used to seem kind of limited. Now that we have Marisas, though, it's gotten hard to pity beatas. They didn't hate their lives and all other humans like Marisa does. They did good works and had relationships with people. Marisa, on the other hand, is almost psychotically sociophobic.
If you read Spanish, definitely give this novel a try. I enjoyed it intensely.
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