The real or imaginary life situations that a fiction writer processes have a formless, fluid, basically liquid quality. Extrapolating the metaphor, we can read river writers and stream writers, lake writers and waterfall writers, bladder writers and watering can writers (without forgetting the sprinkler writers). And we can read Sergi Pàmies, alembic writer par excellence, who once again gives us small doses of talent and high-intensity emotion in his new microscopic book, A les dues sera las tres. Giving little after having processed a lot is an interesting acrobatics typical of stills: a “giving little” (a priori something typical of stingy people), which becomes in him a splendid act of generosity.
In addition to being tiny, his books deal with insignificant issues. He apparently made this decision many years ago. At a table centuries ago, I heard him say literally: “I am only interested in insignificant themes, mediocre characters, irrelevant situations.” What in another writer would have given rise to miserable and skimpy writing, in him gives rise to the opposite. The emotions that so-called “real life” brought him had been enough for him, he did not need to sublimate them literaryy. But now that he tells us something more about the material he experienced every day, his literature gains more and more without losing the clear lucidity that made it shine from the beginning.
In most of his stories (among which it is difficult for me to choose, because although there are some that particularly move me, all of them are impeccably measured and are necessary to the whole), this very Kunderian issue of insignificance underlies. In the Czech writer’s latest novel, Ramón tells his friend D’ Ardelo: “Breathe, my friend, breathe this insignificance that surrounds us: it is the key to wisdom, the key to good humor.” And although Kundera masterfully explains what human insignificance consists of, Pàmies stages it better. From the Catalan saying “no som res però fa de mal dir” (we are nothing but it is difficult to say it), he assumes the first part fully and denies the second with courage: few know how to say this ambiguous truth with the (winged) grace of our narrator.