The title is misleading, because Memòries de mi mateix (Column, in Spanish in Destino), the new book by Ferran Torrent (Sedaví, 1951) is not an autobiography, but rather a novel in which we rediscover some of his characters in mid-century Valencia. from the sixties and in 2019 "to see how both the characters and the city itself have involuted, or evolved."
It is quite a choral work, with various plots and human groups, but backbone of the Mythical Regino, a counterfeiter whose heart has been stolen. “He is a forger who wants to be a playboy, but the historical context in which he has to live means that he ends up being practically a hero. In addition to art, he ends up falsifying documentation to go underground and finds himself looted by the Nazis, ”explains Torrent, who admits that what the Mythical Man“ was looking for was to get rich ”.
Thus, Torrent introduces us to the world of forgery in two scenarios that were intertwined in late Francoism, on the one hand the world of anti-Francoism and on the other, the art that the Nazis plundered from the Jews and that ends up in the houses of the Valencian potentates. The political-social brigade also has an important role, which the writer describes as "very badass." "I didn't suffer from it, but some friends did," he says, and remembers that he was only arrested once, by the national police "for putting the name of the town in Valencian on a poster", but he suffered from a stomach ache and was carrying medicine , the Tagamet, who helped him get out unscathed: “At the police station I said that if they gave me trouble I would vomit blood. They made me sign a paper and that's it. It was already 1976 or 1977, I don't remember, and the police didn't want to make a fuss”.
In any case, in the two periods several plots with many characters are developed: "The secondary ones interest me a lot, because they are not seen, but they do a lot of work and each one, in their own way, contributes arguments to the novel outside the main one" . That is why he also moves the narration "in the first person, in the third person and there is even a page and a half in the second person", and he has tested the alternation of different dialogues in the same chapter, without prior notice to the reader: "A formula that I saw in Vargas Llosa has been in some novels for years, and I liked it because it gives fluidity”.
It has not been a quick writing for him: “I started it before the pandemic, and it had 50 or 60 pages of the first part of the graffiti. But I left it, thinking that perhaps we would all die. When I came back, I didn't like it and, convinced to throw it away, I passed it on to a friend. So I started another one, the one about the Mythical Regino, in the first person. After a few days, my friend calls me and says that he is fine, that I have to continue. He makes me doubt. And in the end I decide to merge them and look for a link between the epochs”.
In both, a critical view: "A novelist's look at current events is always subjective, and it is still my look, which is a bit sarcastic about Valencian politics." If in other books he focused on the corruption of the PP, here the incapacity of the current government is portrayed, and Torrent justifies it because they have not obtained “neither Valencian civil law nor financing. Although Valencia is the third city in the State, it is the third worst financed autonomy”. Why do you have to vote for them? “To avoid revolutions”, he writes, adding that the social democrats are “the best managers of capitalism”.
The companions of El Mítico – Father Rafel, Messié, Llargo, Bohórquez... Marc Sendra – live together in retirement in a residence where they make up the "second system", a network of companies that gives them a problem: "They have too much money and they are looking for the formula to be able to place it without it being a danger after so many years of stealing”. They have 300 undocumented workers, and everything is signed “by a man with incipient Alzheimer's”, a disease that he treats with humor and respect: “My family is devastated by Alzheimer's, my grandmother, my mother and now my sister. I never frivolize about any disease, but my family has always accepted it with humor. When my sister was diagnosed, we were all worried and she said that 'it's all Alzheimer's, right?' Because he still has 10 or 15 years to live, which I don't know if he would have otherwise. For me, irony, humor in life and literature are fundamental”.
Catalan version, here
