How do you experience desire when you’re an 18-year-old girl and you feel immortal? And when you are a 39 year old man? To answer the question, Clara Queraltó (El Plan del Penedès, 1988) wrote Com el so d’un batec en un micrófono, with which she has just won the Llibres Anagrama de Novel·la prize, endowed with 12,000 euros and with the jury formed by Mita Casacuberta, Guillem Gisbert, Imma Monsó, Sergi Pàmies, Jordi Puntí and the editors Isabel Obiols and Silvia Sesé.
In the novel, which will hit the bookstores a few weeks before Sant Jordi, Gabriela, who has just gotten her driver’s license, meets her grandfather in the village the day after Sant Jordi Joan, el Quim, a 39-year-old man who has rented a house there to spend the summer working remotely. According to the author, “they think they control the situation but in reality they enter into a multitude of contradictions”, so she explored “the mechanisms of seduction and attraction”.
The novel is written in a mirror format: on the one hand there is a kind of diary of Gabriela and on the other the version of Quim, but from the end backwards, in an arc that develops from June to november Explaining it again from another perspective and “so that it continues to be interesting” was, explains Queraltó, “quite a narrative challenge”. But quoting Espriu, he remembers that “reality is a mirror that has been broken, and everyone has a piece of it”, so that between one and the other there are inaccuracies and contradictions that end up creating two different stories. Through the feminism of recent years, the writer has made a “different reading” of relationships between couples with such a difference in age, because before “having a relationship with someone older validated you”, she says, and remembers that she herself at the age of 16 had fallen in love with a 32-year-old man: “I’ve put it back together over time, we had to read each other again”, because “women are not always the victims”, and in the case of the its protagonist, “is very clear about what he wants”. Whether it is love or not, the reader will decide because she has tried not to judge the characters. Pàmies and Casacuberta, however, do define the novel as a love story, although Casacuberta frames it in a “demystification”, in relation to works such as Una mena d’amor by C.A. Jordana, or Vals de Francesc Trabal. Pàmies also sees a “change in protocols in power relations, which are now in favor of the girl”.
A teacher of Catalan language and literature, Queraltó became known as a writer when she won the Mercè Rodoreda award for short stories with El que pensen els otres (Proa, 2017), she has also published the novel Et diré R. (Empúries , 2021) and a few months ago he made his debut in the children’s novel with Whistle in case of emergency (Bindi Books, 2023). He has also participated in the collective books Barcelona suites and Summer nights (Univers, 2019 and 2020) and collaborates in various media such as RAC1. Queraltó explains that he applied for the award because of the visibility it gives – until now he was in the orbit of Grup62 and was part of the jury for the Proa award -, and more so considering the renewal record he has had since he started: ” When you write, what you want is to be read, and I thought that winning it could allow me to connect with more readers.”
The Llibres Anagrama prize was established in 2016, when it was won by Albert Forns with Jambalaia, and it has since been won by Tina Vallès (The memory of the tree, 2017), Llucia Ramis (The possessions, 2018), Irene Solà ( Canto jo i la muntanya balla, 2019), Anna Ballbona (I am not here, 2020, when Terres mortes de Núria Bendicho received a special mention), Pol Guasch (Napalm al cor, 2021) and Andrea Genovart (Consum preferent, 2023) , while in 2022 it was deserted.
