March 2007. Not so long ago and at the same time centuries ago. There were no social networks and mobile phones had a keyboard but no internet, and they were used to call. Going on a trip meant disconnecting yes or yes, for good and au pair to Atlanta, and from there I sent e-mails to his friends explaining his adventures, which were forwarded to the point that some strangers wrote him with comments .
From there he returned with the habit of reading and a literary vocation that has taken fifteen years to become a book, Les calces al sol (The Bell), and that in two months has reached the best-seller lists, with luxury presenters like the mayor of Puigcerdà, Albert Piñeira, the journalist Antoni Bassas or the chef Joan Roca. The secret? A great sense of humor behind which there is an emotional story of growth.
The novel fictionalizes that journey through her alter ego Rita Racons, who barely knowing English lands in the home of the Booklands, the antithesis of the character and the clichéd American family, two cultured parents with three extraordinary children between 12 and 5 years old: "They could talk about Socrates or Hannibal's economic policy while having breakfast, but at the same time they were funny," says Rodríguez Sirvent, who works on gastronomic routes in Barcelona. Between linguistic, cultural and social misunderstandings, Rita relates to John, “in fiction heir to Coca-Cola and in reality... he is also an heir and immensely rich, but I can't reveal secrets. But you see that the rich lives of him are not so fantastic”. She also meets Six, a Catalan with whom she discovers a more underground Atlanta, and signs up for some creative writing classes that awaken her vocation.
The novel begins in a Cerdanya that mirrors Atlanta, where she mourns the loss of her grandmother -based on her two grandmothers, a Catalan from Alp, who died shortly before the trip, and the other Andalusian from Lleida who he died during confinement–, for a trip to the Grand Canyon and for various adventures either educating children or exploring sexuality. For Rodríguez Sirvent, “Rita is an intense girl who seeks a vocation that she does not have, as a metaphor for the demands of life, and finds it in a format far removed from what she has always experienced, through her family, through education, friendship, and above all, which is one of the crux of the matter, the tangible distance of an ocean, which allows him to live in such a brutal way. She can be whatever she wants and try everything, and on many levels: sexual, educational, traveling...”.
The author explains that it took her a while to start writing, but when she did “it was like doing an exercise of filling in the blanks. All these years she thinking she was ordering it.” Once she finished it, during the pandemic she thought she wanted to publish it in Penguin Random House: “I sent an email to a total cold door. The same day they told me that they would read it, and after a month Anna Jolis wrote me the e-mail of my life telling me that they were publishing it”.
And now that Rita Racons knows that she wants to be a writer, will there be a second installment? “I don't know about her, but I do. I have it in mind. For me it is important to know where to get the humor, and I already have it”.
Catalan version, here
