El cercle de Felanitx brings together in a volume of three hundred pages, headed by a suggestive and informative foreword by Emili Manzano, the two books of narratives that Miquel Barceló Perelló (Felanitx 1939-2013) published in 2007 (El terme de Manacor , Ensiola) and 2009 (Trenc d’alba, La Magrana) and the unpublished novel L’hivern de 1947, a la vila. It plays – and delights – alongside Julià de Jòdar’s L’azar i les ombres and Mercè Ibarz’s Triptych of the Earth. 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 Death and the Rain by Guillem Frontera, which is another excellent book.
The Felanitx circle includes an extraordinary text, from 2010, based on the work of the painter Miquel Barceló (and 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 district of Artà, a Saracen shelter was discovered, built after the arrival of Jaume I in Mallorca. Kitchen utensils, water jugs, remains of plants and animals were found there.
And three keys: the men and women who took refuge in that balm kept them, hoping to return home. In one of the best texts of the Catalan exile of 1939, Francesc Trabal explains that when he crossed the border, people threw away the keys and that he, like the Saracens of Artà, kept the ones from his house in his pocket. The Barceló, Perelló, Artigues, Adrover, Rosselló, Nicolau, Manresa of today are like those former inhabitants of the island, run over by history.
Barceló Perelló’s books reconstruct the lost world of Felanitx, “when we were few”. It is not an idyllic picture: there is violence and extinction, upheaval and death. In “El terme de Manacor”, the short story that closes the book of the same name 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 desperation of a priest – another Barceló, from 1894 – before the indifference of the parishioners at the crucial moment of the Office of Darkness.
Between reality and terror, Barceló Perelló’s stories talk about the disappearance of the social bond. Follow the trail of troubled, lonely, taxidermy-obsessed or game-obsessed characters. He takes the point of view of a vailet who has access to the houses of the neighborhood, and who observes and keeps the memory of everything he sees there. A vailet whose life and family we hardly know anything concrete about, 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.
Next to the rich human landscape, there is the topographical obsession. The names of the places, of the shops, the description of the streets, of the houses, the obsession with the interior order of the houses: the waiting chairs at the entrance, the first aguaves, the second aguaves, the complicated regulations of the spaces and of the relationship with the neighbors, which is broken when a group of military men enter, without looking, Madò Martina’s house to prepare a chocolate bar. It is as if this world that Barceló Perelló reconstructs 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 material of excavation, subject to the planimetry.
The circle of Felanitx is a volume full of content and very intense. One of the great books of this year.
Miquel Barceló Perelló The Circle of Felanitx Prologue by Emili Manzano Anagrama 313 pages 21.90 euros
