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, which recovers the space of peasant women: a framework of knowledge and sensuality. Wolves, demons and witches –fairy tale characters– talk about social roles, freedom and desire: great questions that, beyond the fabulous world that the author portrays as if she were painting an altarpiece, touch us all.
Daniel Arbos. Bad decisions (Empúries).
Arbós is a writer that I love. Author of comedies at a time when Catalan literature, in general, tends towards overacting sadness. He is a good scientific journalist, topics pass through his hands (miraculous remedies in his previous novel Amb l’ aigua al coll) that allow him to develop controversial, critical and funny arguments. He never falls into rudeness. In this case, based on the story of a boy from a good family who doesn’t give a ball and who ends up crushed by a hippopotamus from the drug dealer Pablo Escobar’s zoo.
Cristina García Molina. The unredeemed (Labreu).
Yo from ustedes, if you haven’t read it, I would take back this year’s Booklet award. The first part of the triptych in which the author turns a school of barracks into a representation of a world without hope is particularly noteworthy. The teachers assigned there fight against the lack of future, discouragement, the feeling that the peripheral urban space consumes people. The boys smell of “neglected childhood, of drought, of hunger, of war, of street ablation, of divergence, of loss, of precariousness, of illiteracy, of delay, of shipwrecks, of foreigner laws”.
Joan Rendé Masdéu. Spirit of wine (Vibop).
Rendé is one of those authors who probably will not write his memoirs, because they believe that literary truth is superior to the more or less perfumed realistic confession. However, in the last few books of his, he has pulled from family and personal stories with splendid results. In Ballaven the black bottom, based on the case of some young people, sons of the masters of a factory, victims of the FAI, and in Deescalades with a text about his beginnings in the world of journalism, in the days of military service . In Esperit de vi, he tells the relationship with the vineyard, in Espluga de Francolí, from the look of the child who hears the rattle of the carriers on the cobblestones, until the misfortune of October 2019 when the flood swept the Rendé Masdéu winery. On the deck, a few bottles of vi de fang that was recovered from the Francolí and that generated a solidarity movement that has allowed the winery to be recovered.
Albert Ovens. And the sky fell on us (Editions 62).
The bombardment of Granollers, on May 31, 1938, was one of the most brutal episodes of the Civil War. In the blink of an eye, five Italian planes killed 226 people and injured more than a thousand. There is very little literature on these events, which were covered up, and I only remember a few pages from the diaries of Joan Triadú, who was a teacher there. Forns reconstructs the events of that day and their consequences in the memory of the residents of Granollers, based on testimonies that he has been gathering here and there and from the literary reconstruction of moments and emotions.
Maria Campillo Guajardo. The spa (L’Avenç).
It was published a while ago but it is an ideal book to read in summer. Maria Campillo revives the family history around a spa in Alhama de Aragón. She connects with another book that has appeared in recent days, also highly recommended: L’estiu passat, by Joan Safont (Comanegra), which examines the phenomenon of summer vacations from the perspective of the great journalism of the 1930s. Campillo revives childhood memories and combines them with genealogical discoveries and reconstructions of a world preserved on glass photographic plates. A world of hot water and starched aprons that allows the author to reflect on identity.
