His friends called him melancholic. That is why Jaume Roures was interested in Aristotle, although he did not feel identified with either bitterness or black bile. When Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel, he liked more the conception of the Turkish hüzün: a collective feeling of decline among the ruins of the Ottoman empire, and a melancholy understood as reflection before action. He is very empirical. When it comes to poetry, he stuck to the classics, and has not been moved by anything after Espriu, whom he is capable of reciting.
Stacked in columns because they no longer fit on the shelves, his books are distributed between the house in Ullà – where he has lived for ten years – and the one in Barcelona, ??near one of the few public schools that in the eighties taught in Catalan. , and where their children would go. Here, behind a desk that belonged to the architect Adolf Florensa, they are arranged by themes and collections – the yellow of La Cua de Palla stands out –, in a controlled disorder, similar to the one he had on his work table, in Mediapro. It is difficult for him to admit it, but it has been complete works; of Trotsky, for example (with notes and underlining). He has them in the Empordà, with the Catalan Encyclopèdia and most of the library.
Roures got good grades. When he was twelve years old he started working on a linotype machine and he still has the ability to detect typos, he doesn’t miss a single one. It was 1964, he lived in Sepúlveda with Casanova, when he saw an advertisement in Edicions 62. He entered as a “do-it-all guy”; There was Ramon Bastardes, then Josep Maria Castellet. Having no educational background, he learned from reading. At fifteen or sixteen years old, he was impressed by Fi de estamana a Dunkirk, by Robert Merle, and El cor es un caçador solitari, by Carson McCullers.
With Solé Tura, Catalonia was kicked when it made Catalanisme and the bourgeois revolution. Until, in 1969, he joined the Model, “the most horrible thing that anyone can imagine.” There wasn’t much, “you read Freud because they didn’t know what he was.” The Carabanchel library was more complete. There he discovered One Hundred Years of Solitude and – aware that it is a cliché – he continues to think that it is the best. To the point that, some time later, he spoke with García Márquez about doing a series, but agent Carmen Balcells opposed it. He also did not reach an agreement with Tusquets to acquire the rights to The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura, whom he admires and knows from the novels of detective Mario Conde. Maybe this Christmas I will go to Havana, he says.
Long trips are the best time to read. Roures tries to do it almost always in his free time, he alternates two or three books at a time. For him, no author defines complexes and miseries like Le Carré, especially in the novels of George Smiley, in whom he will always see Alec Guinness through Irving’s series Coppersmith, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He associates many readings with the audiovisual. About Irene Solà, he likes the depth and construction of the language: “His ability to decompose and compose it in another way is what steals my heart a little.”
He has had a turbulent political life. He lived in Valencia, spent time in Paris. In ’78 he went to Nicaragua and, upon returning, his daughter Teia was born. He did translations until he took the entrance exams for TV3 when it was founded in 1983. Ernest Folch tries to convince him to write his memoirs. He knew his father from militancy – also editor Xavier Folch – and they have always understood each other; with Tatxo Benet, they rescued Navona two years ago. But he assures that he will not make a book about his life, it is a way of business that does not interest him at all. Neither with prison, nor with clandestinity, he does not see himself able to describe the lines and rationing of the fifties, “it is very difficult to tell; The only one who gets it quite right is Jordi Coca in Sota la pols.” Perhaps he is tempted to write something about the period between 1995 and 2015.
He doubts that printed newspapers will exist in 2030. But e-books are television, he says, and paper books are cinema: “You relate in a different way, you establish a bond.” He doesn’t understand that they can abandon themselves under a tree or on a bench, that horrifies him. They are reference, knowledge: “A book is heritage.”
