Rodoreda, a map. Travels, fables and readings (2022) is a very unique book from the last few years, so prolific, by Mercè Ibarz (Saidí, 1954). The pretext is a new reading of Mercè Rodoreda, to whom he has dedicated several books -Rodoreda paisagets, in 2021, and Retrat de Mercè Rodoreda, in 2022 among the most recent-. The singularity of this volume is a proposal of cultural criticism far removed from biographical, philological, literary studies or the history of the most usual ideas, which concentrates like a whirlpool all the aspects of Ibarz’s personality, which have earned him the Trajectoria Award 2023.
Another aspect to highlight is that, being a book that encompasses an entire stage 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, reports on the original world of Saidí. and stories about Barcelona, ??fiction and biography, reading and art criticism, feminist criticism and cinema: everything merges into a single discourse under the sign of multiplicity. It seems that Ibarz has many things to say and that she has only begun to say them.
Why Rodoreda? Using Rodoreda’s brilliant expression, a map, for “affinity of breath.” But this affinity of breath is not between two writers. Better said: it is not the breath of writing but of reading and writing. Ibarz says, in another brilliant image, that Mercè Rodoreda and Natalia Ginzburg “take the tiger for a walk.” That is to say: they release the beast of remorse, fear, horror, demoralization, evil: suffering. Ibarz stands out from them at that point. His tigers keep them in an enclosure. But she, on the other hand, as a reader, is attracted by the bravery, the cruelty, the inexorability of Rodoreda’s literature. It is there where the breaths mix.
Ibarz takes the idea of ??the city that Rodoreda finds in 1949 when he sets foot in Barcelona for the first time after ten years of exile, and superimposes it on his experience. Born in Saidí, a small town in the Ponent Strip that the irrigation of the Aragon canal turned into fertile land, she came to Barcelona in the early seventies to study journalism. He began a professional career in the written press, in various editorial offices until 1989. Afterwards, he continued collaborating in the media, inventing a new way of talking about art in newspapers (for years he wrote in this house’s Magazine and in this supplement). and is a university professor. She publishes a couple of notable essays on the filmmaker Luis Buñuel and on the sculptor Ramon Acín. At the same time, she began her literary career with La terra retired (1993), which achieved great repercussion and moved 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 Street Fever (2005). His narrative books of the second decade of the 21st century announce this Rodoreda, a map. They pass from one genre to another, with little actual novelistic action, much reflection on the outside world and meditation on the inside: Don’t talk about me when I’m gone (2010), Vine com estás (2013). Behind this world – says Ibarz now – we find the city wounded by war – with bruises -, which Rodoreda portrays in his novels. In the edition of the writings of Maria-Mercè Marçal 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 avidity, which creates fidelidades para siempre.
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, of the cultural model that made possible the work of Mercè Rodoreda and Anna Murià, Ángeles Santos, Juli González, Remedios Varo, Joan Miró or the little well-known Àngela Nebot author of a painting that describes the destruction of the educational system of the Republic: the artists who appear in Rodoreda, a map. When in his narrative books from the nineties Ibarz portrays Barcelona – a Barcelona of tourists and shopping centers – the invisible city is there. That explains the power of these works. They are not a description or criticism of the moment: they are integrated into the European constellation, they speak of the destruction of cities and culture that has been a constant of the last hundred years.
For this reason, too, after talking about the world of mothers and grandmothers in La terra retired, in the book that is its sequel, La palma de blat (1995), she introduces the alter ego of a war reporter returning from the Balkans. In the third book, Unfinished Work, which closes the Tríptic de la terra, published in a single volume in 2020 and reprinted on the occasion of the Trajectòria Prize, she opens the most personal dimension with a magnificent portrait of her mother. From the original world we have passed to the great world of journalism, cinema and literature to return again to the origin – an origin that is located ever deeper. Something similar happens in Rodoreda, a map with the figure of her father.
When talking about his dedication to journalism, Ibarz says: “I didn’t do 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 me react and write.”
This continuous agitation leads her to walk around the city, go up to Montjuïc to see painting, go to the movies, listen to the Rollings or Patti Smith from the literary idea. We readers, as nervous as her, celebrate the recognition of her work and we wait for her new books like May water.