There are artists who do the same work over and over again, trying to improve, and there are those who create a new one each time, with the previous experience but renewing themselves. The writer, literary critic and teacher Vicenç Pagès Jordà (Figueres, 1963) was one of the latter: demanding, he reinvented himself in each book and in some interviews he had even compared himself to the chameleon-like David Bowie as opposed to the Ramones or a Bob Dylan.
Jordà died yesterday of cancer that he had been diagnosed with at the beginning of the summer. He had a book about to be published, Kennedyana, a personal essay on the Kennedy family that Ernest Folch's new imprint plans to publish in November in Catalan and Spanish.
He was a weighty author, with twenty books in thirty years, covering a multitude of registers and genres, a career that began after winning the Barcelona Biennial in literature in 1989 and publishing the book of short stories Cercles d'infinites the following year. combinacions (Empúries, 1990), and which continued with a book made up solely of quotations, Grandeses i misèries dels premis literaris (Llibres de l'Índex, 1991), an example of his ambition at a time full of textualism.
His first novel came with El món d'Horaci (Empúries, 1995), in which he follows literature with paratexts such as footnotes, graphics or theatrical monologues. The following work is also one of the most celebrated, Carta a la Reina d'Anglaterra (Empúries, 1997), a nouvelle that concentrates in just over a hundred pages the thousand years of the protagonist's life as a parody of the historical novel. And this is also the seed of his first essay, Un tramvia anomenat text (Empúries, 1998), which develops his experience as a teacher in writing workshops and schools.
The Sant Joan award, in 2003, for La felicitas no és completa (Editions 62), inaugurated a decade of recognition that followed with El poeta i altres contes (Proa, 2005), the Mercè Rodoreda award, and especially with The whist players ( Empúries, 2009), his most valued work, and which won the Crexells prize. And with his siguiente novel, Dies de frontera (Proa, 2014), he won the Sant Jordi Award, the National Culture Award and the Maria Àngels Anglada Award.
The debt to music as a vital referent I paid off with a short essay, Music and us. A look at the years of transition, (Cossetània, 2017), and in a way also with his own last book, Memoria vintage (Empúries, 2020), a kind of encyclopedic dictionary about popular references, between 1969 and 1995, from the arrival of the man in the Moon at the premiere of Pulp fiction. As he then explained to Magí Camps: "The entries are composing a speech with all kinds of elements: culture, music, philology, science, politics, memory... It's regional, yes, and also generational". It's not a memoir, but he recognizes that it is a "personal memoir".
As we have seen, fond of citations, after this he published Les modestes in literature (Vibop, 2020), a short book that continued the task of two years earlier in Les smells in literature (Vibop, 2018): texts by writers, from Homer to Don DeLillo through Sagarra or Espriu on aromas, in one way or another.
In addition to the books, he wrote criticism and articles in numerous media, and in fact before publishing any book he had coordinated the cultural supplement of the Diari de Barcelona for a couple of years. In recent years she had published mainly in magazines such as Presència, República or L'Avenç, and in newspapers such as El Punt Avui and Ara, where this July she published one last article.
He was a professor in the Faculty of Communication Blanquerna of the Ramon Llull University and in the Aula de Escritura de Girona.
His death had an immediate echo on the networks, and especially on Twitter, in which he was very active and where he had published until the day before.
Catalan version, here
