Rodoreda, a map. Travels, fables and readings (2022) is a very unique book from Mercè Ibarz’s (Saidí, 1954) recent, so prolific years. The pretext is a new reading of Mercè Rodoreda, to whom he has dedicated several books – Rodoreda paisajetas, in 2021, and Retrat de Mercè Rodoreda, in 2022, among the most recent. The singularity of this volume is that it proposes a model of cultural criticism far removed from the biographical, philological, literary or historical studies of the most common ideas, which concentrates like a sucker all the aspects of Ibarz’s personality, which have awarded the 2023 Trajectory Award.
The other aspect to note is that, being a book that encapsulates an entire period of research and writing, it anticipates, with great freedom of association, a new era in which there will no longer be books of creation and research books, reports on Saidí’s original world and stories about Barcelona, ??fiction and biography, reading and art criticism, feminist criticism and cinema: everything melts into a single discourse under the sign of multiplicity. It feels like Ibarz has a lot to say and is just starting to say it.
Why Rodoreda? Using Rodoreda’s brilliant expression, a map, because there is “breath affinity”. But this affinity of breath is not between two writers. Rather: it is not the breath of writing but the breath of writing and reading. Ibarz says, in another brilliant image, that Mercè Rodoreda and Natalia Ginzburg are two authors who “take the tiger for a walk”. In other words: release the beast of remorse, fear, horror, demoralization, evil: suffering. Ibarz stands out. He has his tigers locked in a cage: he doesn’t see the time to let them out in writing. But, on the other hand, as a reader, she is attracted by the courage, the rawness, the inexorability of Rodoreda’s literature. This is where the alès mix.
Ibarz takes the idea of ??the city that Rodoreda finds in 1949 when he returns to Barcelona for the first time, after ten years of exile, and superimposes his own experience on it. Born in Saidí, a small town in the West Coast that the irrigation of the Aragon canal turned into fertile land, she arrived in Barcelona in the early seventies to study journalism. He began a professional career in the written press, working in several newsrooms until 1989. Afterwards, he continued to collaborate in the media, inventing a new way of talking about art in newspapers (for many years he wrote in the Magazine of this house and in this supplement) and is a university professor. He publishes a couple of remarkable essays on the filmmaker Luis Buñuel and on the sculptor Ramon Acín. At the same time, he began his literary career with La terra retirada (1993), which achieved a great impact and went from a small local label to Quaderns Crema.
He later moved from the familiar world of the Strip to Barcelona in the short story collections A la ciutat en obres (2002) and Febre de carrer (2005). His narrative books of the second decade of the 21st century announce this Rodoreda, a map. They are books that move from one genre to another, with little strict novelistic action, a lot of reflection on things outside and meditation on things inside: Don’t talk about me when I’m gone (2010), Vine how are you (2013) Behind all this world that he has been building – says Ibarz now – there is the city crushed by the war, that city like a wound that Rodoreda portrays in his novels. In the edition of Maria-Mercè Marçal’s writings Under the sign of the dragon (2004) and in the book L’amic de la finca roja (2017) one of the fundamental values ??of Ibarz’s work emerges, along with the look and reading: friendship based on intellectual greed, which creates loyalties forever.
Ibarz feels that his work is part of a historical continuity. That Catalan writers cannot ignore where they come from: the destruction of the City, that is to say, of the cultural model that made possible the work of Mercè Rodoreda and Anna Murià, Ángeles Santos, Juli González , by Remedios Varo, Joan Miró or the little-known Àngela Nebot, author of a painting that describes the scrapping of the Republic’s education system: the artists who appear in Rodoreda, a map. When Ibarz portrays Barcelona in his narrative books of the nineties – a Barcelona of tourists and shopping centers – the invisible city is also there. Hence the power these works have. They are not a description or a critique of the moment: they are integrated into the European constellation, they speak of the destruction of cities and of the culture that has been a constant of the last hundred years.
This is also why, after having talked about the world of mothers and grandmothers in La terra retirea, in the book that is in some way its continuation, La palmera de blat (1995), he introduces an alter ego who is a war reporter returning from the Balkans. In the third book, Unfinished Labor, which concludes the Triptych of the Earth, published in a single volume in 2020 and now reprinted on the occasion of the Trajectòria Award, it opens up the most personal dimension with a magnificent portrait of the mother. From the original world we have passed to the great world of journalism, cinema and literature to return once again to the origin – an origin that is located deeper and deeper. Something similar happens in Rodoreda, a map with the figure of the father.
When he talks about his dedication to journalism, Ibarz paints a portrait: “I didn’t write opinion pieces until I was fifty, I had avoided it before; I often say that I don’t have any, in my opinion, that I only have nerves, like the poet who first said it, nerves that make us react and write.”
This agitation continues to lead her to walk around the city, go up to Montjuïc to see paintings, go to the cinema, listen to the Rollings or Patti Smith from the literary point of view. Nervous readers like her, we celebrate that her work is recognized and we look forward to her next books with candelabra.
