A Critique of European Essentialist from Catalan Fiction: Jordi Puntí's "Lost Luggage"

Jordí Puntí’s 2010 novel Maletes perdudes (“Lost luggage”) tells the story of a Catalan trucker, Gabriel Delacruz, who impregnated four women in four different European countries while working for an international moving company based in Barcelona and vanished mysteriously a few years later. Gabriel’s life is reconstructed by his four sons: the German Christof, the French Christophe, the British Christopher, and the Spanish Cristòfol. In their thirties, they accidentally discover their mutual existence and form a brotherhood to look for their missing father, who ends up being “resurrected” thanks to this initiative. In my reading, which engages Said’s work on filiation and affiliation as well as Beck and Grande’s contributions on cosmopolitanism, the novel allegorically suggests that a European identity cannot be built from political discourse or philosophical debate alone. The construction of a common European imaginary will mostly depend on shared cultural references and personal exchanges resulting from increasingly dynamic flows among the inhabitants of the EU, rather than any official policy. Puntí’s work uncovers the ubiquity of the search for a common European identity that continues to be founded on obsession with origins (rather than on potentiality, i.e., what one could become) and an insistence on the impossible perpetuation of those origins. The unique sort of family engendered by Gabriel sometime around 1968 is untraditional—just as the political experiment of the EU is innovative. Ultimately, the text questions the notion that “normality” is derived from a shared origin as well as ensuing ethnocentric understandings of identity.