In 2020, Sebastià Perelló (Costitx, Mallorca, 1963) had a popular success with the novel La mar rodona, which reached a larger audience than his other narrative books such as Pèls i signals (2008) and Flush Voices (2016). There are not many readers of what we could call high-end – demanding and sometimes somewhat hermetic literature – and they have to be distributed among many authors. Consolidating a writer is a job that requires insistence, talent and good fund management, to open new entrances and bring disinterested or distracted people closer to them. Club Editor, which has re-circulated several volumes by Jesús Moncada and one of the first novels by Joan-Lluís Lluís, has now recovered Perelló’s first book, Exercicis de desaparecición, from the year 2000.
Last week, while I was reading Les cendres a la piscina by Laura Gost, I was thinking about De porc i de señor, a story from the book we are discussing today. It tells the case of a Mallorcan woman who puts up with a husband who has the will to commit murders. Mallorcan literature is full of these situations that serve to show how the traditional world collides with the modern world, and gather a lot of characters – the killings are a great collective ritual – that embody different attitudes towards life. This is what happens in Laura Gost’s novel. The beauty of Perelló’s tale is that these killings take place… in a flat! In a bathtub! It’s up to the woman to go to the grocery store to buy the pine nuts for the sausages, pepper and fennel. He feels like a caricature and he’s harboring a resentment inside that explodes like a bomb. In what a clever way Perelló knew how to turn the clichés: the cliché of the killing and the cliché of the bad marriage because the wife thinks that the husband treats her like a kitchen whisk. It is a synthetic, fast and very muscular story that makes me regret that the author did not go deeper down this path. Well: the characters, the absurd situations, the family tensions appear in his other texts, but treated with much less bravado, sometimes recreating them in slow motion.
The first books can already have this, and more so when they are published around forty years old: purification, variety, the desire not to cut corners and to make it sound. It is in this sense that Exercises of Disappearance is an excellent introduction to Perelló’s literature, a concentration of his best virtues. How can a man disappear from the map? Writing, traveling and living, says a quote from the Swiss writer and photographer Nicolas Bouvier. Writing and reading are basic components of his world. The dust of the east, which explains a trip to Turkey, could not be understood without the references to the travelers of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the allusions to the Europe of hotels and cafes, of the first tourism, of debauchery and the spleen, which is reviewed in the perspective of the end of the century touched by skepticism.
A fascinating thing about Perelló’s literature is that in the middle of a hollow fragment, of a long description of the inanity of life, a phrase appears shining that tears the page. There is an accidental death, the protagonist pretends not to notice. “No one was afraid of anything and I kept quiet, like people who keep quiet in cinemas.” It’s like one of those sentences by Blai Bonet or Miquel Bauçà, mysteriously elevated and everyday.
There are also slightly eccentric characters – transmuted by the writer – who live life in a subsidiary way and become theater scorers (La veu calcada) or are passionate about lightning (Franklin’s key) and dream of producing it inside the house – as in Andreu de Porc i de señor dreams of slaughtering them -. In another story, The science of loss, which also has a photographer as its protagonist, Perelló talks about an art of the spetec. These are the first books when they’re good, which is the case: a joke.
