Francesc Serés novel the disappointment of the 'process'

Marina and Carles wake up on December 17, 2021, the day they retire as high school teachers.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
05 October 2022 Wednesday 02:48
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Francesc Serés novel the disappointment of the 'process'

Marina and Carles wake up on December 17, 2021, the day they retire as high school teachers. During that day they try to make peace with themselves and with the environment, and especially with the independence process, to which both have given unconditional support until then. They face inner disappointment and wonder where history will put them.

Almost a year after having resigned from directing the Institut Ramon Llull, Francesc Serés (Zaidín, 1972) returns to the novel with La mentida més bonica (Proa), a book that “could not have written from within” for what he explains, for this disenchantment felt by its protagonists. “Between the book and institutional life, I choose the book”, he assures him about the need to distance himself. He has been living in Berlin for months.

The writer has wanted to write "a little fable" that reduces the action to the day of the dismissal of the institute, with two personal plots that are resolved while portraying the progressive loss of faith in politicians, but also try to settle accounts with their own responsibility. In the middle, the economic crisis, the judicial repression, the covid... “What happens to the characters is a plausible and honest story: that has happened to us and our environment, and it is a non-deferrable responsibility, we must assume the part of responsibility and discomfort that touches us”, he explains. You can't say it didn't go well just because of the politicians, because you were there too –develop–. Of course there is a part of personal and collective introspection that I transfer to the characters”. But there is also a certain catharsis: “I had to get rid of it, and close it”.

Serés explains that after narrating the passage from the rural to the urban world (in the trilogy De fems i de marbres, 2003), the middle class (La matèria Primera, 2007), immigration (La pell de la Frontera, 2014) and finally “something as close as La casa de foc (2020)” could not be “inhibited by this topic”, because “it is one of the events that has occupied us with the most energy in the last decade, we have to explain it to ourselves, and with the fiction we can do it”. "Without the pretense of making the novel that explains everything, but a certain state of mind, how we have experienced politics and how we feel now," he says.

The characters in Serés see that the emperor is naked, but they realized it too late: "At what point did you see that there was nothing behind?" but he didn't have any alternative either, and there hasn't been in forty years of democracy”.

For him, of course “there are people who keep the faith, but you have to respect what people think, just as there are many who don't see that Spain is a rotten country. I can't speak for others."

According to the writer, “what motivated the procés is still valid: Catalan continues to be at risk, Renfe is a disaster, the fiscal deficit is overwhelming...”. And the novel also drinks from a moment of generational realism: “M15 fails, the reform of Spain is impossible, and independence has not been possible either. I don't want to say that it can't be, I don't know, but now it has been like that”.

Catalan version, here