Christmas is over, the publishing houses are already looking forward to Sant Jordi and the literary activity is slowly resuming, gradually, but not necessarily with titles just out of the oven. The life of books has been shortened for years, but book clubs often revive them, as we saw on Tuesday at the Ona bookstore, where Álvaro Muñoz started a meeting that will be dedicated to humor from various sides and which he wanted to inaugurate with Albert Pijuan and his Tsunami (Angle, 2020, Pin i Soler award). To talk about it, Muñoz summoned, in addition to the author, Laura Calçada (the author of Fucking New York, in Destino), because she was reading the first while correcting the second and connected them by “the different ways of write about loss”.
Muñoz refers to the postcolonial criticism he sees in the book, because literature is often the excuse to explain the world, and Calçada insists on the television influences he has seen there and confirms them with Pijuan, and asks about the sexual fetishes that appear there , as a scene adapted from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Among the audience is the publisher Rosa Rey and two friends from both Calçada and Pijuan: Jaume Colomer and Carlota Martí, accompanied by the youngest book club assistant, their son Jan, a beautiful sleeper of months .
The writer shares some keys, such as the reason for his writing without paragraphs, an intuition that almost caused him to be shipwrecked twice. Colomer emphasizes that “it is one of the works in which substance and form go together more, because with a more normal style it would not have succeeded” and appeals to the “charge of depth” of this “editorial tsunami”. Pijuan explains to us about part of the documentation: since “all tourist resorts are the same”, he went to Marina d’Or, in the off-season, “to do field work”. From here the conversation drifts into the “globalization of bad taste” and the need for the rich to maintain their reputation, and Calçada expands before the author begins to explain how he saw in the tsunami “the nature as deus ex machina intervening through violence, which is the only way it has”. Calçada ends by quoting Rosalía: “It is the empire that destroys. Empress who builds it”. Pijuan scores the goal: “No one builds an empire without going to the gray areas”.
The next day, the appointment is at the Gigamesh, where the Pratchett Club is held, this time dedicated to Germanes fatals, which Mai Més published a few months ago (in Spanish it was published years ago by DeBolsillo as Brujerías). Under the direction of Carla Campos, some of the 53 members of the club such as Xavi Duch, Xavi Ramos, Javi Lechón and Mónica González explain how many times they have already read the book (between 3 and 8, depending on who) and how the cycle of Bruixes del Discmón is perhaps the most theatrical of the series, as it initially starts from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but adds references to Hamlet, Ricard III, Al vostre gust or Nit de Reis among many others, and at the same time refers to musicals such as Cats , films like The Shining and artists like Charles Chaplin or the Marx brothers. Pratchett is a popular author, but erudition – also popular – always helps to see beyond. Before the publisher Sergio Pérez announces the next titles – with the consent of Judit Terradellas, who is also there -, they explain how in the book the English writer equates magic with the theater, and assures that “words are powerful and they can change the past”, because what happens is one thing and how it ends up being explained is another.
The life and work of Primo Levi was marked by the Holocaust, of which he bore witness as a writer and which turned him into a survivor, as reflected in his poetry, which is so little known. Eloi Creus explains it a little later in the Deskomunal, presenting his translation of En hora incerta (Cafè Central/Eumo, with which he won the 19th Jordi Domènech prize for translation). He recites a handful of poems in the Horiginal cycle with Blanca Llum Vidal and Maria Callís presented by masters of ceremonies Maria Sevilla and Raquel Santanera. Among the audience are also Enric Casasses, Anna Aguilar-Amat, Eduard Sanahuja – about to embark on a journey -, Enric Umbert, Joan Vigó, Ferran Garcia or Núria Isanda. Concentration poetry loves everything, and Creus appeals like Levi to the “tired comrade”, the “gray comrade”, the “empty comrade”. “We are invincible because we are the ones who have already been defeated”, recites Vidal before recalling the agave that says “It is our way of shouting / that I will die tomorrow”. Callís says that a fly is “the only one free, unadorned and healthy”, and that the dust “contains evil and good, / danger, and a pile of written things”. Or as Creus ends: “Then we’ll go, each to his own / because, as he said, it’s getting late”.
