In 2020, Sebastià Perelló (Costitx, Mallorca, 1963) achieved success with the novel La mar rodona, which reached a larger audience than his other narrative books such as Pèls i senyals (2008) and Veus al ras (2016). . There are not many readers of what we could call high-end literature – demanding and, at times, a bit hermetic – and they have to be distributed among many authors. Consolidating a writer is a task that requires insistence, talent and good management of the fund, to open new avenues of entry and attract disinterested or distracted people. Club Editor, which has once again put into circulation various volumes by Jesús Moncada and one of the first novels by Joan-Lluís Lluís, has now recovered Perelló’s first book, Exercicis de desaparició, published in 2000.

Last week, while I was reading Les Cendres a la Piscina by Laura Gost, I was thinking about De porc i de senyor, a story from the volume we are discussing today. It tells the case of a Mallorcan woman who puts up with a husband obsessed with massacres. Mallorcan literature abounds in these situations, which allow us to show the clash of the traditional world with the modern world, and bring together a lot of characters – the slaughter of the pig is a great collective ritual – who embody different attitudes towards life. This is what happens in Laura Gost’s novel. The beauty of Perelló’s story is that these massacres take place… in an apartment! In a bathtub! It is the woman’s turn to go to the store to buy the pine nuts for the black pudding, the pepper and the fennel. She feels like a caricature and builds a resentment that explodes like a bomb. How intelligently Perelló knew how to turn clichés upside down: the cliché of the massacre and the cliché of the bad marriage because the woman thinks that her husband treats her like a dirty rag. It is a synthetic, fast and very muscular story that leads one to regret that the author has not gone deeper down that path. Well: the characters, the absurd situations, the family tensions appear in other of his texts, but treated with much less energy, recreated in slow motion.

It happens sometimes with the first books and more so when they are published over the age of forty: purification, variety, the desire not to fall short and to make a splash. It is in this sense that Exercicis de desaparició is an excellent entry into Perelló’s literature, a concentrate of his best virtues. How can someone 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 pols de l’est, which tells of a trip to Turkey, cannot be understood without references to travelers of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the allusions to the Europe of hotels and cafes, of early tourism, of debauchery and of spleen, which is revisited 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 long description of the inanity of life, a brilliant phrase appears that cuts the page. A death has occurred by accident, the protagonist pretends not to notice. “None is not afraid of res and I go silent, like the people who are silent at the cinemas.” It seems like one of those phrases from Blai Bonet or Miquel Bauçà, mysteriously elevated and everyday.

Bizarre characters also appear – transcripts of the writer – who live life in a subsidiary way and are theater prompters (La veu calcada) or are passionate about lightning (La clau de Franklin) and dream of reproducing them at home – like Andreu in De Porc i de senyor dreams of killing the pig. In another story – La ciència de la pèrdua, which also has a photographer as its protagonist – Perelló talks about an art of explosion. That’s what first books are when they’re good, like in this case: a bang.