For the people of the Priorat, Roser Vernet (El Masroig, 1955) is quite an institution, as an activist for the region and founder in 2006 of the Center Quim Soler, Literature and Wine in the Molar, with a great job of disseminating and cultural creation.
After having written throughout his life – among others, he was part of the last incarnation of Ofèlia Dracs –, it is not until now that he has collected a set of literary prose in Lo mig del món (Club Editor) . His, however, is not properly a book of memoirs or self-fiction, but a “mixture” of texts “that he was leaving here and there, by hand, by type and with a computer”. The bulk of the book are pieces of essayistic tone around the landscape and memory, linked to reflections that come from the Priorat but which can well be rooted in other realities, because although she places “the middle of the world” at the end of the Lloar, so is wherever we are. And there are also, without warning the reader, texts that are pure fiction and that at the same time maintain an investigative tone around the mystery of identity, to build a mosaic that explores their world from words.
The search for a language of its own is one of the aspects that stand out, often linked to its historical reality, such as the pelinx – “the last representative of the lineage of used cloths”, which are “an element as modest as it is necessary”. “I am interested in the vindication of speech, framed in a world that tends to excessively homogenize things, and I wanted to reflect my idiolect, beyond a lexicon that is not in the dictionary, because there is no northern standard -western”, explains Vernet. However, the author is clear that “she would never want this to be the issue”. And even so, he takes space to write about his distinctions between loneliness and solitude, or the various fogs that trap us: “Sometimes we all use the same words, but we’re not saying the same thing”, he points out. And he still insists: “If one thing panics me, it’s homogeneity, because I think it’s the death of anything.”
It’s about reflecting “the relationship with the place and how the place makes me who I am, rather than explaining battles”, he says. And the fact is that the reader will not find, for example, the story of his exile at the end of the seventies – as a militant of “the radical independenceist left” -, but part of this intimate and literary experience: “Always there there is a circularity between going and coming back, of being what you are and then ceasing to be. There is a paradox between this rootedness which is the middle of the world, which is where Our Lord set the compass, and at the same time this constant movement”, he says, recalling the sentence he found on a wall in Venice: “The departure does not it is but the beginning of the journey back home”.
A movement at its own pace, because despite “the deficit, which I also claim, we live in an absurd acceleration that contaminates everything, but here you can close the door and fuck the field”.
It is a world seen from the four elements, earth, water, fire and air, with all their derivatives and nuanced differences, such as the distinction between air and wind… “They are the most primordial, most primordial things , from before we were there, and they can condition everything else. Now we are faced with the problem of water, but there are also the fires that arise from it, the air we breathe, and the earth that endures and supports it, and I still don’t know how it does it”.
A debut that arrives now, which “coincides at a time when I relax a little my other activities, not from the book world, precisely, but from all the other cacaos in which I am always involved. And I give myself more time, because before writing always took second or third or fourth place, there were other emergencies”.
