This 2024, Jordi Sarsanedas (Barcelona 1924-2006) would have turned one hundred years old and his novel El martell, which turns seventy years old – it was first published in Club Editor, under the umbrella of Aymà, in 1954 – is the big stone of the rather lame celebration of the centenary. Sarsanedas was a key man in the Catalan miracle of the sixties, at the Agrupació Dramàtica de Barcelona and at Serra d’Or where he was an intelligent and respectful editor, who opened the door to young people. He was a good teacher, at the French Institute, and many students remember him. He started as a poet, moved on to short fiction, wrote a great book – Mites (1954) – which, among others, influenced the young Quim Monzó and without which part of the Catalan narrative would not be explained philosophically based and fantastic with Maurici Pla and Marina Espasa at the helm. From the pages of this newspaper I had the pleasure of celebrating with great fanfare the books he published as an adult, when he again had the time and desire to write. To name two: L’enlluernament, al cap del carrer (2001), poetry, and Una discretara venjança (2005), short stories.
Jordi Sarsanedas’ father, Ramon Sarsanedas, was one of those Catalan artists of the 1930s – like the great Josep Granyer – who made lacquered sculptures. Sarsanedas’ literature has something of lacquer: it is modest, it shines, and you can immediately see the marks of the fingers. Although it is contemporary, it is precious and as if from another era. The other noteworthy aspect is that, since Ramon Sarsanedas and Rosa Vives were moderate people, linked to the Catalan Action party, they went into exile in 1937: the son studied in France and returned with a degree. This explains why, as Manel Ollé very well points out in the epilogue of this edition of El martell, Sarsanedas’ novels connect more with books by Trabal or Calders who lived in Chile and Mexico than with those written here by the his friends Capmany and Pedrolo. That’s also why, when Ollé has the insight to relate The Hammer to Boris Vian’s novels, you think: yes. Whenever The Hammer comes to mind, immediately after it comes Alphaville, a strange adventure from Lemmy Caution (1965) by Jean-Luc Godard, which Sarsanedas anticipated by ten years. If a film were to be made about The Hammer, the city of Novoconstánça would be Barcelona. A realistic Barcelona to which nothing would need to be added to make it a city from another planet.
This play between a fantasy novel “with a trench coat and a gun” (as the narrator of The Hammer says) and existential realism is one of the book’s great successes that connects with a tradition that reaches back to Peter Handke, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover. There has been a crime, a man has died and the bloodstain on the mat is in the shape of a hammer. Unlike the unmixed “overcoat and gun” novels, what leads to solving the enigma is not intelligence or logic, but a long wandering in which the narrator – nephew of the victim, Caius Deva–, like a knife sinking into a slice of bacon, cuts through the layers of Novoconstance society, work, sports, leisure and love. Strangeness dominates everything.
The hammer is a novel in black and white, with characters who have become accustomed to living in a bleak world. Of the many very powerful things I have found in re-reading it, I want to highlight the Panathlon, a sports club of rich boys who are waiting for the moment to collect their inheritance, where a cocktail called mizzi wins. With one of these mizzi I toast to the long-lost Jordi Sarsanedas and Joan Triadú (who signs the foreword), to Males Herbes and to Manel Ollé.
