"I haven't been publishing for ten years. Puede que vivir doesn't have importance. Things move poco a poco". flors (Columna, in Spanish in Destino), and it actually follows ten years after the previous work of fiction.On the 16th he will present it in La Setmana del Libre en Catalan.
It is a novel with little action and a lot of reflection, whether around the writing itself or the various ways of facing life, claiming tenderness and smile without losing the culture of effort, but also questioning it, and taking the condition of “to be a link to these women who decided to do what they considered they had to do and not what was expected of them, and who were always branded as whores, witches or crazy people. Thanks to them, many of us do.”
In the book, a woman goes up to a mountain town to recover from a crisis through writing. There, she stops time, talks with the family that houses her and also writes her stories, marked by a wound that is explained little by little with mental illness as a background.
It also talks about the hardness of life in high mountain towns, their abandonment and, in some cases, recovery. “About 12 years ago I went to some valleys that I didn't know and discovered that between the sixties and nineties the town was abandoned due to the closure of the school, which is killing the town. The patriarch of the house began to tell me the history of the town, how he alone and with his hands reopened the roads and rebuilt the houses," explains the author, who returned to write it and took eight months, between leaving as director of the Institut Ramon Llull and taking over the management of the Ona bookstore.
Its narrator, La Solitaria, gives voice to the characters, in a process of listening and conversation that allows her to stop time: “It starts with orality, and confessions end up coming out. Instead of literature of the self, it is literature of you, listening to others and making it yours. The things that are surely worth writing are those that are difficult to write, those that are difficult to explain. Furthermore, by listening to others you end up listening to yourself,” he says, while claiming to have taken so much time to publish the book: “I don't believe in this speed with which we all live, this fierce thing generates anguish in me.”
Catalan version, here
