We will be there again. Sant Jordi, with its literary breakfast, the stalls, the megaphone music, the tables dressed with the four bars, the plastic buckets with roses inside, the cellophane papers with ears of wheat and exhausted flowers. And the books: books for the whole year and seasonal books, novelty books and persistent books, hard covers, soft covers with and without dust jacket, offset prints, digital prints, with chocolate chrome illustrations, colored pencils, typefaces and fancy designs, prizes and trumpet blasts.
La casa tapiada (Comanegra) by Julià de Jòdar is the star book this Sant Jordi. After the recovery of L’atzar i les ombres, the cycle of three novels around the life of the writer Gabriel Caballero, with a portrait of Badalona, ??the Murcian emigration, the Catalan working class and the traveling theater, Jòdar recovers his alter ego and subjects it to a new deconstruction. The characters who appear in the previous books, those who treated him when he was a slightly misfit neighborhood boy, when he worked in a paint factory or when he was engaged in underground politics, look at him from all angles, reveal unknown and contradictory aspects of his trajectory and bring to light the pitfalls of composition, the play between author, narrator and character. A choral novel, written with a great narrative thrust. Between the penediment (the artist’s correction that hides a previous drawing) and the palimpsest (the reuse of the parchment to write on it), La casa tapiada offers a fresco of Catalan life in the sixties, with characters that tingle as in a painting by James Ensor.
Ocàs y fascinación / Ocaso y fascinación (Club Edi tor/ Penguin Random House) is the return of Eva Baltasar after the successes and emotions of Permagel, Boulder and Mamut: the triptych read, applauded and translated. In this case, it explains the fall of a girl, from a tidy family, who chooses her own path. A series of optimistic decisions and accidents put him in a borderline situation. He has a crappy job and is homeless. Baltasar makes us experience the anguish of living on the street and showering with a liter and a half bottle of water, and makes us enter the other side, in the style of the student diary that ended crazy by Sebastià Juan Arbó.
This 2024 is the Sant Jordi of music. Carme Riera has returned to the novel with Una ombra blanca / Una sombra blanca (Editions 62 / Alfaguara), a book about an African-American soprano who has a heart attack on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, recovers , but loses his voice. To help her, a doctor at the Presbyterian hospital recommends that she reconstruct her life until she finds the episode or episodes that caused her blockage. A hint: when he had the heart attack he was singing Tosca’s aria, with verses that talk about guilt and the harm done to others. The search takes us to Mallorca, where the soprano lived for a few months, protected by a great bel canto figure.
Xavier Cugat was also a child prodigy, but he soon left concerts aside and started a career in variety shows, which led him to become very popular – Xavier Cugat’s orchestra was the resident orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria – , to make movies, marry flag women and associate with mobsters. Fascinated by his figure, Jordi Puntí wrote Confeti (Proa), which is this year’s Sant Jordi award. As in the case of Una ombra blanca, he uses an interposed voice, a man from Cugat’s environment, who reconstructs the story and introduces – out of pure admiration – small objections and criticisms. A chiaroscuro portrait emerges, with sequins and lanterns, parties, applause, jealousy and sadness.
Within its genre – a historical novel for the general public closer to films and series with a lot of post-production and digital image than to the novel-novel where the most important thing is the density human that creates language–, History of a piano / History of a piano (Planeta / Destino) by Ramon Gener is good enough. Gener knows a lot about music, he likes to share his passion, he is a great communicator who sees beyond the bare music. He takes a collectible piano that falls into the hands of his literary alter ego, and makes the piano tell History. The main character of a predestined child (predestined child prodigies are also the soprano de Riera and the Cugat de Puntí) allows him to introduce a reflection that touches the reader: what could this vailet have been without the war?, how many great poets and artists died in the First World War without us having a mention? The well-woven plot places the piano in a network of supportive relationships between characters of different nationalities: friendship and sensitivity against pain.
Els murs invisibles / Los muros invisibles (L’Altra / Temas de Hoy) by Ramon Mas is a comprehensive document about friendship, dependence, the end of youth and suicide, based on the relationship between two boys who they met in an atmosphere of skateboards and joints. One leaves, leaves that world behind and goes to Barcelona with the desire to do things, study, be a writer, edit. While the other, Vic’s hero, is clouded and ends. But it makes you live the story with a feeling of anguish and pity.
Offered to hand, el paradís crema (Anagrama) is the second novel by Pol Guasch: as in the case of Eva Baltasar, a reunion after successes. Guasch’s books are like a ten-meter wave that sweeps the reader into a vital and problematic, loving and vibrant depth. With several themes that are linked: friendship, fidelity and commitment, the crisis in the relationship between grandparents, children and grandchildren and the disappearance of the future. With AIDS in the memory and on the horizon. The recovery of El martell (Males Herbes), the great novel by Jordi Sarsanedas, first published in 1956, takes on a new meaning alongside Guasch’s work.
Toni Cucarella hadn’t published for years and is doing it again with a novel written under the auspices of Bohumil Hrabal: a portrait of initiation, of a Valencian vailet in relation to an eccentric uncle who opens his mind and world Qui de casa se va (Amsterdam) begins spectacularly: Uncle Cep collects stories of farts and keeps them, covered with a plate, in an old porcelain urinal: there is no clean pam!
Beyond the novel Ràbia, so current and successful, Sebastià Alzamora is the author of books that review history from a sometimes fantastic, always political point of view. The action of El federal (Proa) is located in La Bisbal, in 1869, with the uprising of the Gloriosa, against the absolute monarchy and in favor of the Federal Republic, which is inevitable to relate to the events that have lived in the last years in Catalonia.
The idea that the writers of the, let’s call it literary novel, can reach the commercial public is behind the idea of ??the quality best seller that appears in one of Julià de Jòdar’s novels or in Les concesions de Miquel de Palol A commercial novel (Editions of 1984) by Ponç Puigdevall also refers to it from the title itself. Puigdevall is in a flat position to talk about a family from Sant Feliu de Guixols who has gone on leave. A choral portrait that, based on a closed core, draws the anti-values ??of non-solidarity, selfishness and incommunicado.
Sílvia Alcàntara has returned with Cèlia Palau (Editions of 1984) to the world of Olor de cologne, following the protagonist from the moment she leaves the textile colony to live her life, without the burden of family and work. Things are not as he would like and he falls under a new situation of submission. With a disillusioned style, an authentic Catalan and with a great ability to concentrate feelings, Alcàntara transforms her personal experience: Cèlia Palau is the mirror of the lives of many Catalan women.
Vicenç Villatoro offers a derivative of the novels of electrification and swamps: Urgell, la febre d’aigua (Proa). The epic of one of the great works that have made the wealth of the country, with the tingling of small life. Another thematic novel is Guanyaràs una mar lisa (Periscope) by Miquel Martín i Serra about the world of the coral reefs of the Costa Brava.
Jenn Díaz explains in Violència en tres actes (La Magrana) an experience of abuse and violence that she suffered. He unravels it narratively, in a stripped-down and concrete way that involves the reader in his reflections. In Com un batec en un micrófono, this year’s Llibres Anagrama prize, Clara Queraltó reconstructs a summer love and shows how the boyfriend imposes on the girl, who takes the initiative at the beginning, a form of submission .
The new longevity is a topic that is being talked about more and more. Antònia Carré-Pons dedicated a book to it, When the bad milk was discovered. And now he has written another one, El cásting (Club Editor), which is presented as a gerontological comedy about some ladies who survived covid who are looking for a host for the guest room.
La puresa de l’engany (Columna) is the new novel by the musician Gerard Quintana, starring a film director from Girona who travels to Cuba in the nineties, and meets a poet who comes with him to Girona. But everything seems to indicate that he is an impostor.
We are lucky: Miquel de Palol has a publisher who believes in it and who puts The Garden of Seven Twilights (Navona) into the hands of new generations of readers, becoming an indisputable classic, an important book of European postmodernity. While La Magrana recovers two books by Maria Antònia Oliver, starring the detective Lònia Guiu: Antipodes and El sol que fa l’anec, which take her to Australia and Germany. This second title includes Oliver’s first detective story, which was published in a volume by the Ofèlia Dracs collective.
The debutantes: Maria Arimany, social educator, has won the Documenta prize with the book of stories You have to reach the forest when it’s still dark (L’Altra). The emotional turbulence is projected onto the landscape and village life. Marc Font, graduate in Translation and Interpretation, publishes La modista de Gràcia (La Campana), a novel about the world of clothing: from the factory to the tailoring workshop, with a plot of murders of brides. Marc Parera, journalist and translator, brings out La nit mes clara (La Magrana), a short, intimate novel about a young man who, touched by the death of his father, lives a double life: student by day, prostitutes at night . Sònia Lleonart Dormuà, specialist in direction, marketing and leadership, makes her debut with Nascuda de Venus (Rosa dels Vents), about a secret painting by Botticelli and a Catalan restorer who unravels its mysteries. Jordi Font, farmer and shepherd on the family farm, in L’estiu del gaig blau (Angle) talks about the conflict between father and son, the desire to run away and the decision to stay. A version from within the world of farmers.
