Lady Puffin is a photographer passionate about puffins (puffins, in English) and dies of cancer. Her friends Rita and Sol (one for life, the other for the last few years) mourn as best they can, while they become friends and Puffin watches them from limbo and plays tricks. It happens in the new novel by Gemma Sardà, Lady Puffin (Comanegra).
Lady Puffin's passion for puffins is also hers...
Yeah, I've spent my life dragging my family on trips to go chasing puffins, and I haven't had much luck. I have seen many, but always flying, in the sea, on the cliffs, with binoculars, but not seeing a sunny meadow full of puffins next to me. The day it was time to do the excursion it rained, the weather was bad, or I had to go to an island and that day the boat did not leave... And in a novel you can make the characters luckier than you and fulfill your wish by making them do it someone else. She has died when she wasn't playing and she has left a project half done, and that is why she is left in limbo.
Aside from the puffins, she doesn't share much else with the protagonist...
No, I'm alive! The character arose from the death of a friend, many years ago, also from cancer, and it is a way of bringing her back to life. But it is not a portrait of her either, and I took her name from another friend, the photographer Cristina Gallego, who worked for many years at La Vanguardia and is also a lover of puffins, she was luckier than me. She dropped the name of Lady Puffin and I thought it's a very cool name that should be used.
Another character is a sculpture...
Yes, it is a sculpture made by Toni Batllori (author of the Ninots of this newspaper) with a micro-patronage among friends, to whom he explained the project and we saw it born, from the first drawing to the end. Once done, he gave it to Barcelona and it is installed on Diagonal with Rambla del Poblenou.
But the name changes...
Yes, Malip is the Monument to lost illusions, but I want illusions not to be lost, so for me they are perpetual.
For Lady Puffin it's like the Brunette. Also for Gemma Sardà?
I confess yes. I have asked for many things, and some have been granted. It is a refuge, a place to go. We need places to fuck, we need symbols. Some people go to hug trees, why not hug a stone tree? It has fabulous power.
How was the book conceived?
I always start with a character, here Lady Puffin, and then I create her family, here Rita and Sol, with their partner, Simó, a fashionable theater director, and Malip emerges as one more character. The challenge was to make him speak, like the living and like the dead, and literature allows you to enter this code.
Once you have the characters, does the theme come out on its own?
The Puffin already carries the theme of friendship with her, and then I thought: are my friends' friends my friends?, and I wanted to question it. If a friend of a friend comes to your house, he receives it from the start, and maybe after two days you want to throw him down the stairs, or maybe you connect a lot because of that person in between. The novel is about that, about how friendship works for some and not for others.
Simó, Rita has a hard time...
Rita comes from abroad, like an earthquake. She is a person who has started from scratch many times, a thousand jobs, a thousand lovers, a thousand adventures and tomorrow she is always far away, she is charming and expansive and you love her very much, but perhaps you would not want her at home. She is very intense, what do they say now.
She is opposed to the other friend, Sol.
She learned to sew as a child and works in the Liceu tailor shop, with a quiet job, with her shifts, labor rights, in a creative place that also has a more mechanical side, she also has to hem, dye shoes and run washing machines. She lives well in this job, she has no more aspirations, and she clashes with Rita's character, but opposites also attract and there can be a great connection. We let go if they agree...
And with his partner, Simó, he enters the theater, of course.
Yes, he has to premiere a play for the inauguration of the new Beckett room, in 2016, which is when the book is set, and there is an internal revolution in the actors. I don't know not to put theater in a novel. The first, La veu del Cyrano (Empúries, 2016), was all theatrical; in the second, Mudances (Comanegra, 2019), it was through a secondary character, the Diva, and here she has a subplot. I always want to talk about theater, without shoehorning it, and here I was doing very well.
It is a short novel, with short chapters, short sentences... Another type of writer would have developed much more all the plots that he suggests or points to with four details.
My style is short, yes, and I like to put small symbols that are found again and the reader recognizes them. Describe the environments and characters with few details to give the reader air to imagine the rest. For example, I am talking about a red dress that is pinched by the closet door, and I will not explain the rest of the room, to give the reader room.
There is the portrait of the shepherd...
Yes, he is a character that we only see in a portrait and the importance is where he is placed, how he is made. Possible lives that we also link with the Malip, the lost or unfulfilled dreams, what could have happened. But he had to be targeted, insinuated.
There are three ways to advance the story, with the narrator, the Puffin and the dialogues.
The narrator focuses on the characters, Puffin speaks to the reader in the first person and I go through a lot of dialogue to make the story very close to the reader, who feels them.
Does the richness of the dialogue come from the theater?
I see so much theater that it is surely an influence, like keeping the rhythm in mind, trying not to get tired, thinking of the novel based on scenes. When I write, I write an entire scene, which are not stories but isolated perhaps they could make sense.
And there is also a lot of sense of humor.
To talk about very tragic things and that is not a drama. There is pain, losses, absences, it is a novel about mourning, but with a light point that gives humor.
He began writing after passing through the Escola del Ateneu Barcelonès. What role did she have?
I defend it very much, because there is something like a misunderstanding with writing schools. In all the other arts, people go to schools and are trained, be they faculties or academies. At school they don't make you novels, you do some exercises and receive training. To me, more than teaching me to write, the course I took with Laia Aguilar gave me security. I had an idea and I didn't know how to put it, and I left knowing that she could write it. Nobody suspects someone who has studied painting or piano, but is a writer who has gone to school suspicious? Nope.
He has also given him a group.
It's that you connect with people. We made a super solid band that is still going strong after ten years. We read each other, we correct ourselves from the first chapters we write and it is an invaluable network. We tell each other things mercilessly, we share and enjoy.
He already has other projects in mind.
Yes, since I finished Lady Puffin I've written some stories and we'll see where they end up, and I already have the resentment of the next novel with a character who accompanies me quite often and soon it will be time to look for a family.
And after this tour you still don't hear a writer.
I am a proofreader, I work in the Opinion section of the newspaper, and the language has given me the job of proofreading, it is to polish what someone else has written without being noticed, respecting the style, you cannot take advantage. And when I write they also have to correct me, of course, because when you write you are aware of many other things.
Do you have a writer as a model?
I could be reading an author that I like very much and it could be that it gives me the feeling of “How the hell am I going to write, after that?”, as happens with Mercè Rodoreda, that every time I read her I would not write in ten years... and on the other hand others, whom I would not pretend to imitate, do motivate me, like Marta Rojals or Amélie Nothomb, who when I read them make me want to write. Both things happen to me with other writers, of course.
Catalan version, here
