The life of Andreu Claret's father is a novel, which has now served him not only to win the Ramon Llull award but also "to heal some wounds from war and exile", as the author himself explained after the award announcement this Friday. París érem nosaltres, which Columna will publish on March 1 (and in Spanish, Planeta) is and is not a biography, because although the facts “are its central skeleton”, the novel has allowed him to “go further and face the feelings and the emotions”.
“It is the story of my family, but with an intimate and personal dimension, it has been a literary challenge and a great personal challenge”, added Claret, who was born in French exile (Acs, 1946). "Writing about parents is risky, because like everyone else, my father was not a one-piece man, he had his contradictions," he said, insisting that the writing process has been "repairing": "As son of exile, has helped me close things that perhaps I had not understood.
The reader will rediscover figures such as Lluís Companys, Pau Casals or Pompeu Fabra, with whom Claret wanted to reflect "the toxic environment of exile", but as "a story of overcoming winners and losers", this has led him to "make it a reflection of what was happening in exile, where there was a black horizon, it seemed that they could never return, while they were chaining wars. A lot of people sank." All in all, Claret assures that he did not want to "fall into the trap" of despair, because after all it is the story of a couple who get ahead.
Thus, the novel recounts the life of a humble man, a rabassaire who in Bages “grows politically with two lines, the Catalan and republican and the workerist. In the first part, the book follows him from his birth in Súria, and later it will delve into the Civil War. Later he will arrive in France, and will manage forests in Occitania, with which he "earned a lot of money" and at the same time helped the maquis, to the point that the Gestapo arrested him, although he managed to get out after spending "52 unpleasant days in the Castellet of Perpignan”. There is also a place for love, which for Claret became a central point, and it is a trip to Paris, "a culminating moment", with what will be her mother from which the book takes its title. Later they arrived in Andorra, in 1949, "then a den of spies and executioners, with a very difficult life," and it is from there that the mayor of Barcelona Josep Maria Porcioles called him in 1962 to "save" the city from heavy snowfall, point at which the book closes.
Carles Casajuana, a member of the jury with Pere Gimferrer, Isona Passola, Núria Pradas, Gerard Quintana, Carme Riera and Emili Rosales, has assured that although he knows the author, he did not think of him when he read it, because although it maintains the familiar names, "it is the story of a man who gets ahead, an adventure that the reader lives with joy and seemed very credible to me, without knowing that they were real events. The prize, endowed with 60,000 euros – the best endowed in Catalan literature together with the Sant Jordi prize – will be delivered at an event on March 7.
After three novels about the Republic and the Civil War and exile, Claret concludes this period: "It is the novel that has cost me the most, I have suffered a lot." A work that wants to "rebuild bridges and heal wounds", with the hope that "it will serve the descendants of all those who had to go into exile".
Catalan version, here
