The work of Sergi Pàmies has been grafted onto the last books of the memory, one step away from non-fiction, and his new book, A les dues seran les tres is a repeat, because once it has passed through his literary filter . year.
When he published the previous book, L'art de portar gavardina, five years ago, he explained that he was involved in the novel, but now he is publishing a new volume of stories.
Yes, and even to be able to do La gavardina I wrote a novel before, which didn't turn out well but which ended up motivating me. The conditions were there and still are, but since that didn't work out very well and La gavardina turned out very well, I felt at home again and I've continued here, even though I also wanted to distance myself from 'some topics from the previous book and there was no gender promiscuity, I have been monogamous.
But there is promiscuity in the styles of the stories.
Of course, because I continue to enjoy it a lot. I also have the feeling that the three previous books were very tied to the emotional state and this one is not, and then it gives me more freedom, it is as if I have recovered the most experimental toolbox. Looked at in this way, because while I was doing it I didn't have this perception, I wanted to try things, but I couldn't theorize it. On the other hand, when I have seen it finished, I say: wafer, this must go this way.
Yes, there is a theory of the story.
a lot It's always been there, but here there's an overdose of it and what's more, my love of telling stories about writing converges with my decision to make a kind of gratitude to journalism, which are brothers. Some stories are chronicles, and there are many journalists as protagonists, so the confluence of writers and journalists looks like a bar towards the end of the day.
Chronicle mixed with fiction.
Some story goes to the edge of the diary, with a point of chronicle... and I often don't put names because the fun is never knowing if it's true or not. In an article in a book of these extraordinary ones by Nora Ephron, I have a neck that hurts; in Spanish, No me gusta mi cuello, in Asteroide), says that the important thing is not fiction or non-fiction, but the narrative. I am 63 years old, and until now no one had said it to me in such a flat way. You've been arguing all your life about whether self-fiction, self-portrait, memory, creativity... No, it's just that!
The subject is not that important.
No, the important thing is the ability to tell a story. There can be elements of fiction or reality, and at some points you have to make the rules of the game clear to the reader, but it's a fictional book, I'm a writer, and I'll put my cheese in it. The question is whether we are able to create with a journey, with a table, with a story, with a novel even, an artifact, an artifice that makes this communication established through the narrative.
There are stories in the relatively distant past and others quite recent, such as the trip to England on the occasion of the London Book Fair last year.
The central obsession is time, and I hadn't realized that either until I finished it. All the stories, or 90%, talk, explicitly or implicitly, about time. Time as a great supplier of stories, of joys, of disappointments. That's why At two will be three is like the apotheosis of absurdity related to time. I advance, retreat or shipwreck, always through time. This also comes from avoiding some themes from La gavardina. I had to go far ahead or far back, or go to the day before yesterday, to skip all the death of parents, disappointed love... It's like sometimes you ride a bicycle without one hand, so I decided that I had of tying my hand so as not to go towards these topics that I had already exploited too much and I didn't feel like it either.
But the children and the mother do go out.
Yes, that is, one is what it is and I didn't want to put too many limitations on myself either, but the point of view is different, the wound is no longer there, or it's a different kind of wound or you've evolved. The way you look at your children when they are already 25 years old and the fact that you no longer feel so responsible, nor do you want to be perfect, all this is also related to time, in the end. Just as the previous book was about the end of love in all its dimensions, this one is about time, and also a very literary perception, very related to how what happened after Franco's death is written, the relationship with Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, 33 or 34 years ago. And mix it with stuff from four days ago.
Is memory invented?
From 100% real facts I develop a literary artifact. The trip to Quebec with Manolo (Vázquez Montalbán) is a tribute to the pure chronicle, with notes I took at the time, but there are also invented ones. I had a box from the trip and it was intact, like a time capsule, and when I found it I got into it, even though I had the idea for the story a long time ago.
There are many parallels between Vázquez Montalbán and that young Pàmies.
I was very interested in the contrast between the established author and the debutant: one who flies first class, the other who doesn't... One who sits at the end of the coach and the other in the front... And that's it this is true He comes to the Hilton and asks for a typewriter, and I thought that if I ask, I'll be kicked out. Or maybe not, but that's the perception.
He was quite a reference.
Manolo built a much nicer sentimental universe than the one we had until then, because he added food, football and copla. It was as if you entered a house that was a bunker full of sectarian communists and here we will make a dining room where people will eat, here next to it there is a football field where Ramallets, Kubala, Cruyff will play... and we will also have a theater where Lola Flores will come.
When he starts writing, is it clear that he is making a book of stories?
Yes. What I'm not clear about is what the book will look like. And then it is all by elimination, as a reserved right of admission. I have to write a lot more than I end up posting, because a lot of the things I write either don't work or don't belong in this family that I don't know what it's like, but I do know what it's not like. In the end, it's all about simplifying.
To keep books short...
But very dense! Even with the hope, of infinite vanity, that people can read them again. That's already a note, huh? Sometimes I am told that it is very short, but you will read it several times.
