The circle of Felanitx brings together in a volume of three hundred pages, which opens with a suggestive and informative prologue by Emili Manzano, the two books of narratives that Miquel Barceló Perelló (Felanitx 1939-2013) published in 2007 ( El terme de Manacor, Ensiola) and in 2009 (Trenc d’alba, La Magrana) and the unpublished novel L’hivern de 1947, a la vila. Hace juego – y da gusto verlo – con L’azar i les ombres by Julià de Jòdar and Triptych de la terra by Mercè Ibarz. They are fundamental works that raise the map of common identity, from a specific place, with a concentrated human landscape, which gives rise to a myth: Felanitx, Badalona and Saidí. To this triptych of triptychs I would add Guillem Frontera’s death and rain, which is another excellent book.
The Felanitx cercle includes an extraordinary text, from 2010, based on the work of the painter Miquel Barceló (Artigues). Miquel Barceló Perelló is one of the great specialists in the culture of al-Aldalus, who has incorporated archaeological research into his studies on Andalusian society. The text he wrote about the painter ends with a snapshot of his life as a historian-archaeologist. Half a kilometer from the houses where the artist lives, in Ferrutx, in the municipality of Artà, a Saracen shelter was discovered, enabled after the arrival of James I in Mallorca. Some kitchen containers, water jugs, remains were found there. of vegetables and animals.
And three keys: the men and women who took refuge in that cave kept them in the hope of being able to return home. In one of the best texts of the Catalan exile of 1939, Francesc Trabal says that when he crossed the border, people threw away their keys and that, like the Saracens of Artà, he kept the keys to his house in his pocket. The Barceló, Perelló, Artigues, Adrover, Rosselló, Nicolau, Manresa of today are like those ancient inhabitants of the island, trampled by history.
Barceló Perelló’s books reconstruct the lost world of Felanitx, “quan érem pocs”. It is not an idyllic picture: it contains violence and extinction, depression and death. In “El terme de Manacor”, the novel that closes the book of the same title describes the decline of the town, due to an unknown sin. In “La passió, a la Vila”, from A trenc d’ alba, he recounts the despair of a parish priest – another Barceló, from 1894 – in the face of the indifference of the parishioners at the crucial moment of the Office of Darkness. Between reality and terror, Barceló Perelló’s stories deal with the dissolution of the social bond. Follow the trail of dazed, lonely characters obsessed with taxidermy or gambling.
He adopts the point of view of a kid who has access to the houses in the neighborhood, who observes and keeps the memory of what he sees there. A boy about whom we barely know anything concrete about his life and his family, as if his existence had no real substance or as if the evil in the world had something to do with the lack of direct family references.
Along with the human landscape, very rich, the topographical obsession. The names of the places, the shops, the description of the streets, the houses, the obsession with the internal order of the hamlets: the waiting chairs at the entrance, the first aiguavés (the slope of a roof), the second aiguavés, the complicated regulation of the spaces and the relationship with the neighbors, which is broken when a group of soldiers enter, unceremoniously, Madò Martina’s house to prepare a chocolate. It is as if this world that Barceló Perelló recreates in such a vivid way (the detail of colors and smells is impressive, for example, in the description of the slaughter of the pig in “A trenc d’alba”) were excavation material, subject to a planimetry.
Felanitx’s cercle is a volume full of content and very intense. One of the great books of this year.
Miquel Barceló Perelló El cercle de Felanitx Prologue by Emili Manzano Anagrama 313 pages 21.90 euros
