There is a point in Beatriz Serrano’s novel Unhappiness when its protagonist Marisa goes to a museum and admires a painting. One gets so tired of Marisa’s incapacity to care about anything that it’s a heartening moment when she tries to enjoy a work of art. However, the reader’s hopes that there’s some substance to Marisa’s otherwise vacuous personality are dashed when she explains what she likes about it.
The painting Marisa admires is Hieronimus Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”:
She has no use for the first and the third parts of the triptych because a religious message bores her. Instead, Marisa concentrates on the central panel that represents her idea of what the world should be like. Lots of sex in the most bizarre permutations and absolutely no other activity whatsoever! What’s not to like? Interestingly, Marisa herself is not very sexual. Her sensuality is almost entirely limited to food. Plus, she’s on heavy tranquilizers that don’t lead to great libidos. This is not the case of a very sexual woman beaten down by a repressive society. Marisa’s situation is the exact opposite: she’s almost entirely unsexed in the world of extreme sexual permissiveness.
Marisa’s explanation for why she believes that the central panel of the triptych would represent the world at its best is, as always, a meaningless slogan. “Such a world would be diverse and friendly [diverso y amable]” she says, oblivious to how much of an oxymoron this is. Diverse means heavily and often irreconcilably conflicted, grating, uneasy. Marisa is too sociophobic to have a normal conversation with anybody who’s identical to her in culture, language and upbringing. In a diverse environment, she’d be even more lost.
The core of Marisa’s personality is at full view in this scene. She was told she must be in favor of sex-centered lifestyles and diversity. And even though she has absolutely no use for either and actually couldn’t tolerate them, age will cheer for them mindlessly and aggressively. The mystery of women who advocate for the destruction of women’s sports or depolicing is solved! They are all Marisa.
And that’s quite scary.
Clarissa's Blog 
I would love to see The Garden of Earthly Delights for real, the Hell part of the tryptych scared and then fascinated me as a kid once I got into heavy metal. The middle part of the triptych I actually find boring, it looks like Woodstock or Glastonbury without cool music and I’m both asexual and celibate.
The idea of not having an interest in religion or apathy towards spirituality is alien to me, I’m programmed to believe in something. Even when I wasn’t a Catholic, I was in a pagan phase and read mythology and loved art and music and tried to meditate. Although my brother is an atheist, he volunteers at an animal shelter and works the polls on Election Day, so atheism doesn’t have to mean a sort of self-centered solipsism. While I myself don’t have sex, I can appreciate art, literature, music and film and good food and drink, that sort of mindless solipsism is horrific
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From an interview in Vogue Spain, in which the author – who is a professional journalist for the liberal daily El Pais – says: “No considero que por ser mujer y feminista te tengas que negar al amor, pero me gusta la historia y la relación que tienen. Mientras escribía el libro hice una entrevista en la que hablé con personas sobre poliamor y me explicaron el concepto de anarquía relacional, que me pareció interesante. Fui consciente de que esto es lo que estaba buscando con Marisa y lo que viene a decir es que no tienes que darle más importancia a una relación que a otras”.
It’s disheartening to see a writer- whose job should be to disentangle the twisted matter of life and bring to light at least a speck of the truth entwined in that knot – so unequal to the task and oblivious to the inherent implications. The protagonist, Marisa, has no meaningful relationships, with anyone, to the point that its author thinks that there is no point in giving more importance to one relationship over and above any other.
I am curious as to Beatriz Serrano’s life experience: surely she must know that to love a husband, one’s own child and/or a few other closer relations is not the same as “otras relaciones”.
https://www.vogue.es/articulos/beatriz-serrano-libros-el-descontento
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Interchangeable people, relationships, body parts. The human being becomes a Fordist conveyor belt.
But whatever platitudes the author mouths in interviews, the logic of her text shows that this is a terrible model of society and can only produce dangerous sociopaths. I don’t want to do any spoilers but, believe me, the novel leaves no room for doubt that Marisa isn’t only harming herself. Her view of others as interchangeable cogs makes her dangerous.
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