In recent years, the books published by some large publishers have been accompanied by highly illustrated dossiers with character files, a description of the setting and a text by the author who, in a more or less confidential tone, tells you what he wanted. write. The one about La llei de l'hivern by Gemma Ventura Farré (El Vendrell, 1990), refers to the graphic novel. It presents the protagonist, Grandfather Ricard, Roser, the three beggars, the woman with the yellow shoes, the factory workers, using the sketching technique that is so fashionable and that gives it a modern air. It tells us – as the cover, drawn in the same style, also tells us – that the novel does not take place in the real world or – if you hurry me – in the world of allegorical literature – that it always has an unfathomable background, that it resists being represented–, but in a space of confluence between drama and play, the wound and the symbol, philosophy and the scheme. It also inevitably gives it the air of a product, as befits a literary award that needs to reach buyers with a simple idea and image. If it's a romantic novel, a drawing with a girl covering her face. If it is a novel with a historical background, a black and white photo that, to make it more dynamic, is presented in silhouette.
Gemma Ventura Farré is a music teacher and deputy director of the digital Catorze where she publishes articles and interviews. It is the first novel that she writes. She unfolds in a symbolic setting the relationship between a grandfather who is dying and a granddaughter who has not found her place in the world. She captures the sadness for the loss and the perplexity before the agony. While the grandfather is unconscious in bed, the girl thinks that he must be in the kitchen preparing an omelette, as if there were a dissociation between the body and the person. She rebels against Roser, the maid, who treats the semi-deceased with disgust and contempt. And she seeks distraction and solace hanging around the town, one of those cursed towns that appear from time to time in Catalan literature today: from Ferran Garcia's historical Guilleries, to Núria Bendicho Giró's victor-Catalanesque Yoknapatawpha. The Catalan benchmark for this type of literature –which has not been surpassed (Rodoreda, aside)– is L'estuari by Miquel Bauçà. It is difficult to catch a book with such visionary force. At his side everything seems substitute.
Once Jaume Vallcorba, speaking of J.V. Foix said that young people reject their parents and love their grandparents. This is what happens with the protagonist, that she establishes an intimate connection with Ricard. It must be assumed that behind the abstraction there is a sentimental basis, perhaps a lived pain, which creates intensity when, for example, the girl combs the dying man's hair and retrieves his clothes from a garbage bag where the maid Roser has put them. She pulls a shirt up to her face, sniffs it, and gives off her beloved scent. Other times it is the presence of death in everyday life: the girl rescues a heron from the raft, drowned, and organizes a burial for it, with a cross. And she is surprised to see how a line of ants passes over the mound, indifferent to death. People are like those ants.
The lyrical novel requires great solidity of style. The tone of La llei de l'hivern is not quite well basted. Some situations are resolved through short or very short sentences that seem to clash with each other. The idea of the sketch, of the note, of the sketchbook returns to your head. You have to think that after this first attempt, other more refined and mature books will come.
