“I haven’t published for ten years. Maybe living is not important. Things move little by little”. Three sentences that condense some of the ideas behind Iolanda Batallé’s latest novel (Barcelona, ??1971), Massa deutes with the flowers (Columna, in Spanish in Destino), and it actually comes ten years after the previous work of fiction.On the 16th, he will present it at the Catalan Book Week.
It is a novel with little action and a lot of reflection, either around the writing itself or about the various ways to face life, claiming tenderness and smiling without losing the culture of effort but also questioning her, and taking the position of “being a link to these women who decided to do what they felt they had to do and not what was expected of them, and who were always labeled as whores, witches or crazy. Thanks to them many of us do”.
In the book, a woman goes up to a mountain village to recover from a crisis through writing. There, he stops time, talks to the family that hosts him and also writes his stories, marked by a wound that gradually unfolds with mental illness as a background.
It also talks about the harshness of life in the high mountain villages, how they have been abandoned and, in some cases, recovered. “About 12 years ago I went to some valleys that I didn’t know and I discovered that between the sixties and the nineties the town was abandoned following the closing of the school, which is killing the town. The patriarch of the house began to tell me the history of the town, how he alone and with his hands reopened the roads and rebuilt the houses”, explains the author, who returned to write it and took eight months, between leaving office as director of the Ramon Llull Institute and taking over the management of the Ona bookstore.
Its narrator, the Solitaire, gives voice to the characters, in a process of listening and conversation that allows her to stop time: “It starts from orality, and confessions end up coming out. Instead of literature of the self, it is literature of you, of listening to others and making it your own. The things that are surely worth writing are the ones that cost to write, they are the ones that cost to explain. In addition, by listening to others you end up listening to yourself”, he asserts, at the same time claiming that it took so long to publish the book: “I don’t believe in this speed with which we all live, this ferocious thing generates anxiety for me”.
