We live in a moment in which everything seems possible in Catalan literature. Perhaps it has been the years of the pandemic that have produced a creative fever and fattened the refrigerators of publishers. Faced with the uncertainty of the moment, big groups and small labels hoarded and booked. Now everything comes out – a lot – with an exuberance of pages never seen before.
Among the heavyweights is Miquel de Palol, who publishes Bootes (Navona in Catalan and Spanish). It will be the last of the monumental novels he has published since 1989 when El jardà dels set crepuscles came out. A great book that wants to cover everything: sex, politics, technology, morality, with an acidic and disenchanted look at the future of the world. Based on a complex geometric figure, characters that correspond to the stars of a constellation and a city-machine that has the structure of the synchrotron.
Pep Coll has written about the Pyrenees from all points of view: from the little costume novel to the high-stakes drama. In La larga migdiada de Déu / La larga siesta de Dios (Proa / Planeta) unfolds in a novelistic way the story of a clandestine organization that smuggles Jewish children to save them from the Nazis. The voices of the protagonists bear witness to the sadness and anger of having to leave the house, to the anguish and terror of an uncertain future.
Xavier Bosch aspires to create quality commercial literature. On March 32 / 32 de marzo (Universe / Cathedral) we move to Paris occupied by the Nazis. Barbara investigates the family past and introduces a reflection on journalism as a propaganda machine, with Signal magazine painting occupied Paris rosy. It is also a vindication of the relationship between grandmothers and granddaughters, at a time when a lot of literature is being published about estranged mothers and daughters.
This is not the case in Imma Monsó’s La mestra y la Bèstia / La maestra y la Bestia (Anagram in Catalan and Spanish) where the mother-daughter relationship allows for the development of a unique, interesting and complex personality. Monsó mixes history and biography, about a teacher who arrives in a small town in Pallars. Basically, the clandestine anti-Franco movements.
The most painted woman by Mà rius Serra (Proa) combines research and invention based on the figure of the painter Maties Palau Ferré (1921-2000), an artist who seemed destined to have a prominent place in the art of the 20th century. A strange contract with the promoter Miquel Peirats Fenollosa, who exploits it, ends with a conviction in court. What makes an artist want to destroy his work?
The artistic theme reappears in Memorias de mi mÃsmo / Memorias de mà mismo by Ferran Torrent (Columna / Destino). With his characteristic, well-connected and dynamic style, Torrent develops a plot with many derivations in which the forger Elmir de Hory even appears. Messié steals the paintings of good Valencian houses that come from the looting of Jewish families by the Nazis, the legendary Regino copies them and makes a double profit.
The truth is not written (La Campana) is a new immersion of Lolita Bosch in the history of her family: from the normalized slavery of 19th century Catalonia to the creation of a large art collection by part of the great-grandfather, Rómul Bosch and Caterineu. “Today I would return the paintings to Vall de BoÃ, because yes, because it is true that they are sad in the museum – writes Bosch-. I would put plaques on all the sculptures in Barcelona to say who they pay homage to” (to the slavers).
Criticism in Barcelona has magically disappeared from the programming. People are already a little fed up with it. Queda Seré el teu mirall by LluÃs-Anton Baulenas (Comanegra), a novel about real estate speculation, set in 2003. Baulenas, who had already tackled the speculative Barcelona novel years ago in La felicitat, plays with two plots : the money-laundering and quixotic adventure of a very rich man who buys historic buildings to eliminate their backlogs.
Profecia by Raül Garrigasait (1984) and Desescalades by Joan Rendé i Masdéu (Cossetania) agree in taking the current plague of wild boars as a symbol of the despair we live in. Garrigasait in a book full of cultured references, very well written, with a plot that goes from family life to post-trial politics. Whereas Rendé is caustic and startling, and is close to the Voltairean fable. In addition, he has written a great autobiographical story about his early years as a journalist.
Contra el món by Pere Antoni Pons (Empúries) is a dystopian novel about the disappearance of the Serra de Tramuntana, in Mallorca, after a cataclysm, heralded by the strange behavior of the animals (cows that do not give milk, birds that crash into the wall). The story, of a fantastic realism, puts corruption, speculation, gentrification on the table. Pons describes Mallorca in a state of emergency. climatic, social and cultural.
Pregà ria a Proserpina / Oración a Proserpina by Albert Sà nchez Piñol (La Campana / Alfaguara) talks about a moment of apocalyptic change in a story set in ancient Rome, with a threatening intraterrestrial civilization. At the other end, Mirabilis by Eva Espinosa (Males Herbes) presents a positive utopia, for a girl who runs away from the Nazis – how many Nazis. “The more you get away from reality the closer you get to the truth”.
We have abuse novels. Triomfador / Triunfador by Joan Jordi Miralles (Males Herbes / Seix Barral) updates the sports novel genre by introducing an element of denunciation. Based on his personal experience – he was a resident at La Masia del Barça –, mixed with fiction, he tells a story of neglect and abuse. The red pencil by Oriol Molas (1984) chronicles a case of bullying in a Catholic boarding school in the 1980s. Former schoolmates meet at a fiftieth anniversary party, the protagonist has to put up with the same jokes – they call him Dumbo – and relives the emotional lows.
We have stories that bring human values ​​to the fore. The Sant Jordi prize has the power of a claim that brings authors who might not have been biting so hard to the public. This is not the case with Gemma Ruiz Palà , who is a very popular author. Our mothers (Proa) tells a handful of stories of women from the 1960s and 1970s, determined, brave, who stand up and pave the way for the women of today.
The law of winter by Gemma Ventura Farré (Destino) portrays the final moments of the relationship between a granddaughter and her grandfather, with whom she has lived for many years. The grandfather represents a form of lost wisdom. Love is a form of resistance against oblivion. With this book, Gemma Ventura Farré won the Josep Pla prize, which is one of the ones that gets the most hype.
Aterratge / Aterrizaje by Eva Piquer (Club Editor / Tránsito ) is a testimonial book, about the need to find a way out after the death of your partner. Through the metaphor of the emergency landing – and the research around a case in 1973 in Iceland – he finds the point to start a new life with a new home. After the storm by Emili Bayo (La Magrana) portrays a character resentful of society and contrasts the experience with that of a woman fleeing abuse and her daughter.
A story is a stone thrown into the river by Mònica Batet (Angle) is a novel with a European vocation, about Ceaucescu’s Romania, which uses folklore as a reference, as a form of resistance, through the figure of two researchers With the desire to poke its nose into European history, there is Sota el fan by Joan Roca Navarro (La Magrana), which starts from the disappearance of three children in a town in the Ebro Delta, in the seventies, and the link with the Balkan war. David Gà lvez has written a novel about a unique house in Andorra, built in 1916 by a young Cèsar Martinell (of the cathedrals of wine) and has drawn the thread of the lives of two characters – the American millionaire Warren Fizke and the Russian Nicolai Popoff–. The result is a puzzle about Andorra, Saint Petersburg and New England: La torre dels russos (Labreu).
Two novels of the return. In La pell del món by Xavier Mas Craviotto (The Other) the mother is dying, the daughter returns and encounters a world that is not hers. My brother doesn’t get along, they’ve built a block of flats in the garden. Mas Craviotto, professor of Catalan literature in Bristol, has taken as references the great authors of literature: from Clarice Lispector to David Foster Wallace.
Valentina, a correspondent in Beirut, also returns home in Marta Orriols’ La possibilità de dir ne casa / Ese lugar al que llamamos casa (Proa / Destino) and finds a banal world. Coming from the experience of war, he shuddered at the lack of depth of emotions and feelings. Faced with bourgeois banality, the protagonist strives to link the pain of historical time with the violence of personal time. Some come back and others leave. The protagonist couple of Anna Codina’s Algoritmes (The Second Periphery) in London looking for a path in the digital world and, she, as an influencer. Things are not as pretty as they make them out to be.
Memoria de totus tres by Piti Español (Multistudio Books) is a book between memoirs and fiction, about three friends in the seventies. It begins with the death of Gabriel Ferrater, on April 27, 1972. There we find Bandera Roja, acids, the cowboy movies at the Esplugas City studios, the murder of Puig Antich, the show Mori el Merma by Joan Miró and the Putxinellis Claca and the singer Nico in La Floresta.
La diligencia de Marta Magrinyà Cossetà nia) is a period adventure novel about a journey from Reus to Barcelona in 1841 that connects the destinies of characters from different estates. A Catalan western, with intrigue, love and violence.
Let’s finish with stories. Penediments d’Andrea Mayo, heteronym of Flavia Company (Navona), is a collection of short stories with a reflection. About a tattoo session or a fly hitting the glass. In recent months, Sebastià Alzamora has had more than deserved recognition with awards for the novel Rà bia and the premiere of the theatrical version of Els amos del món. Orders are accepted (Ensiola) collects stories “with delivery date”. Assignment does not mean covering the file, as demonstrated in The inner vision, the story of a man closed in on himself.
