Christmas is over, publishers are already facing Sant Jordi and literary activity is resuming little by little, gradually, but not necessarily with titles fresh from the oven. The life of books has been shortened for years, but book clubs often bring them back to life, as we saw on Tuesday at the Ona bookstore, when Álvaro Muñoz started a meeting that will be dedicated to humor from various angles and that he wanted inaugurate with Albert Pijuan y su Tsunami (Angle, 2020, Pin i Soler award; in Spanish, The Great Wave, in Sexto Piso). To do so, Muñoz summoned, in addition to the author, Laura Calçada (author of Fucking New York, in Destino), because she read the first while she corrected the second and connected them through “the different ways of writing about loss.”
Muñoz refers to the postcolonial criticism that he sees in the book, because literature is often the excuse to explain the world, and Calçada insists on the television influences that he has seen and confirms them with Pijuan, and asks about the sexual fetishes that appear, like a scene worked from Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Among the audience is the editor Rosa Rey and two friends from both Calçada and Pijuan: Jaume Colomer and Carlota Martí, accompanied by the youngest attendee of a book club, her son Jan, a beautiful month-old sleeper.
The writer gives out some clues, such as why he wrote without paragraphs, an intuition that almost made him shipwreck twice. Colomer highlights that “it is one of the works in which substance and form go more together, because with a more normal style it would not have worked” and appeals to the “depth charge” of this “editorial tsunami.” Pijuan enlightens us about part of the documentation: since “all tourist resorts are the same”, he went to none other than Marina d’Or, out of season, “to do field work.” From here the conversation drifts to the “globalization of bad taste” and the need that the rich have to maintain their reputation, and Calçada vents before the author gives rise to explaining that he saw in the tsunami “nature as a deus ex machina intervening through violence, which is the only way it has.” Calçada concludes by quoting Rosalía: “It is the empire that destroys. Empress who builds it.” Pijuan scores a goal: “No one builds an empire without going to the gray areas.”
The next day, the meeting 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 The Witches of the Discworld is perhaps the most theatrical of the series, since it starts from Shakespeare's Macbeth, but adds references to Hamlet, Richard III, As You Like It or Twelfth Night among many others, and at the same time refers to musicals like Cats , to films like The Shining and artists like Charles Chaplin or the Marx Brothers. Pratchett is a popular author, but scholarship – also popular scholarship – always helps to see further. Before the editor Sergio Pérez announces the next titles – with the acquiescence of Judit Terradellas, who is also there – they explain how in the book the English writer equates magic with theater, and assures that “words are powerful and 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, to which he testified as a writer and which turned him into a survivor, as reflected in his little-known poetry. Eloi Creus explains it a while later in the Deskomunal, presenting his translation of En hora incerta (Cafè Central/Eumo, with which he won the XIX Jordi Domènech prize for translation; published in Spanish by La Poesía, Señor Hidalgo, 2005). Recite a handful of poems within the Horiginal cycle with Blanca Llum Vidal and Maria Callís presented by masters of ceremonies Maria Sevilla and Raquel Santanera. Among the audience are Enric Casasses, Anna Aguilar-Amat, Eduard Sanahuja - about to embark on a trip -, Enric Umbert, Joan Vigó, Ferran Garcia or Núria Isanda. Concentration poetry covers it all, and Creus appeals like Levi to the "tired comrade", the "gray comrade", the "empty comrade". "We are invincible because we are already vanquished", 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 free, desymbolized and healthy one", and that 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".
Catalan version, here
