We had a great time”, recalls Julià Guillamon talking about If the memory fails us (Libros de Vanguardia), the book interviewing Quim Monzó and Sergi Pà mies, which arrives today in bookstores and kiosks.
In a long interview that lasts several days, Guillamon proposes topics and distributes the game in the conversation, which gradually weaves a thread of complicity in which one anecdote comes out, now the other. “It was a nice reunion”, continues Guillamon, who had dealt a lot with Monzó and not so much with Pà mies, and the last two are very friendly with each other, but they haven’t seen each other maybe since before the pandemic, and still less all three together, and even less to chat so much and about so many things.
“This also opens up the ability for them to talk about things from another perspective”, says the newspaper critic, who knows a lot about the career and life of both and was able to prepare a long questionnaire. He begins by making a retrospective looking towards the beginnings of Monzó with L’udol del griso al caire de les clavegueres (Edicions 62, 1976), which he never wanted to republish – well, actually the conversation begins with “good day” that the it lasts half a page and already allows you to see the tone of it all, carefree and sly. Both Guillamon and Pà mies had bought and read the book at the same time, and Pà mies even remembers when he first saw Monzó, who went with Biel Mesquida and LluÃs Fernández to an exhibition in the late seventies. “There was a tiny tiny star system”, we read in the book.
But we also find there already at the beginning the great literary success of PÃ mies, according to himself: the letters he wrote during the military for other recruits less gifted for letters, in a kind of Cyrano, and we read how he discovers that “it is very more fun not to talk about me and do it in prose”, because he had previously written poetry: “I came from being Joan Vinyoli dos”.
“There won’t be another book like this,” believes Guillamon, partly because of Monzó’s withdrawal from social life, and also, but in a different way, of Pà mies. And it is that the harmony they display makes them discover to the reader their present and, above all, past deriads, such as when Pà mies had two computers, one connected to the Internet and the other not, or the times that Monzó in many articles had blurred the line between reality and fiction in the name of irony that has spilled throughout the entire literary work. Journalism is one of the areas covered, but also the time when they started doing radio and a parade of characters that surrounded them, seasoned with constant references from one to the other’s books.
It is a meeting of three friends who have not seen each other for a long time, yes, but it is also the visit – the sessions took place in Monzó’s studio – of two disciples to an older brother who has marked them. “He did completely different things and in Catalan, and he was already an influencer, he noticed things that no one else noticed and we admired them”, says Guillamon, who does not hesitate to admit: “If I had not known his work I know if I had written the same”.
Guillamon describes his interviewees as “two literary anomalies, one the son of a bilingual family, detached from the tradition of the moment; the other, with revolutionary parents who didn’t know Catalan until he came to live in Barcelona at the age of 11″.
“I didn’t remember this one”, the book says at one point, in that way of doing things that all three of them have that often the reader is not sure if it is ironic, but, even so, he enjoys it.
