Irene Solà I gave you eyes and you looked into darkness (Anagram).
After the overwhelming success of Canto jo i la muntanya balla Irene Solà has written a spectral novel, with a desire for great style, that recovers the space of peasant women, a network of knowledge and sensuality. Wolves, demons and witches – characters from fairy tales – talk about roles, desires and freedom: the great questions that, beyond the fabulous world that the author portrays as if painting an altarpiece, touch everyone.
Daniel Arbos. Bad decisions (Empúries).
Arbós is a writer I love. Author of comedies in an era in which Catalan literature, in general, tends towards exaggerated sadness. He is a good scientific journalist, topics pass through his hands (miraculous remedies in his previous novel, With water around his neck) that serve him to develop controversial, critical and funny arguments. He has a fine writer’s pulse and never falls for the stone of the joke. In this case based on the story of a boy from a good family who doesn’t get any right and ends up crushed by a hippopotamus from the zoo of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar.
Cristina García Molina. The unredeemed (Labreu).
If you haven’t read it, I would take back this year’s Book Reader award. Particularly noteworthy is the first part of the triptych in which the author turns a shanty school into a representation of a world without hope. The teachers who are assigned there fight against the lack of future, discouragement, the feeling that the peripheral urban space gets inside the people and gnaws at them. The scoundrel, who makes a fortor “of neglected childhood, of drought, of hunger, of war, of ablation street, of divergence, of loss, of precariousness, of illiteracy, of delay, of sinkings, of laws of foreignness”.
Joan Rendé Masdéu. Spirit of wine (Vibop).
Rendé is one of those authors who may never write a memoir, because they think that literary truth always comes before more or less perfumed realist confession. In recent books, however, he has stretched family and personal stories with splendid results. In Ballaven el black bottom, based on the case of some boys, sons of the owners of a factory, victims of the FAI, and in the booklet Desescalades with a very good text about how he started in the world of journalism, when he was militar service. In Spirit of wine, he explains the relationship with the vineyard, in l’Espluga de Francolí, from the look of the child who hears the catric-catrac of the carriers on the cobblestones, until the misfortune of October 2019 when a flood he took the Rendé Masdéu winery. On the deck are a few clay wine bottles that were recovered from Francolí and that generated a movement of solidarity that has allowed the winery to be recovered.
Albert Ovens. And the sky fell on us (Editions 62).
The bombing of Granollers, on May 31, 1938, was one of the worst episodes of the Civil War. In the blink of an eye, five Italian planes killed 226 people and injured more than a thousand. There was very little information about these events, which were covered up, and I only remember some diaries of Joan Triadú, who was a teacher there, that talk about them. Forns reconstructs what happened that day and the consequences it had in the memory of the people of Granoller, based on witnesses he has been collecting from here and there and from the literary reconstruction of moments and emotions.
Maria Campillo Guajardo. The spa (L’Avenç).
It’s been out for a while now, but it’s an ideal book to read in the summer. Maria Campillo relives the family history around a spa in Alhama de Aragón. It links with another book that has appeared these days and that can also be recommended: L’estiu passat by Joan Safont (Comanegra), which examines the phenomenon of summering from the perspective of the great journalism of the 1930s. Campillo relives memories from when she was a child, combined with genealogical discoveries and reconstructions of a world preserved in glass plate photographs. A world of hot water and starched aprons that allows the author to reflect on identity.
