Against the long and dark night of Francoism

You don't need to be a firefly to realize that the pendulum of History is once again swinging towards a repugnant rise of the right and far-right, a real shame that confirms that human beings are an idiotic animal that stumbles many times on the same stone. Faced with this, and even though it sometimes seems that Catalan literature tends to forget particular and collective realities, there are snipers who refuse to succumb to general inertia and misery. This is the happy case of a writer by birth who, in fact, does not conceive of life without writing: Joan Cavallé. The prolific and respected author from Tarragona publishes a new, magnificent and necessary novel, "La nit" (Angle Editorial). Full of symbols, metaphors, documentation, and winks at great works of universal culture, "La nit" consciously invites us to delve into the long and dark night of Francoism and the horror of a cruel and murderous dictatorship dominated by His Excellency, the oldest tyrant in Europe, as wisely called by Joan Brossa, so skillful that, despite passing away, he did it well enough to weave the vile business in such a way that everything remained tied up and well-tied. Thus begins Cavallé's journey: after a verse by Raimon that gives the volume its title, we penetrate the orbits of a young student who participates in a clandestine network and has a mission to carry out in stages, he is our Virgil in a social hell founded on fear.In addition to the courage to break silences, traumas, and mutisms, and to tell truths like temples related to the terrible present, La nit by Joan Cavallé demonstrates other high values: the ability to trace a psychogeographic map of a resistant Tarragona; the gift of dialoguing with an eternally revisited classic like James Joyce's Ulysses; the superb control of tempos and narratological rhythms when combining external landscape with internal introspection; the firm and perfect mastery of each sentence; expressiveness… Each page is marked with a high capacity to generate interest, suspense, exhilarating intensity. For all these reasons, La nit is a great novel and an unexpected surprise of this season that I will never tire of recommending.Joan Cavallé, fortunately, is not alone: there are other literary samurai such as Eduard Márquez, who did a radiography of this era with the colossal volume 1969 from L’Altra Editorial; or Julià de Jòdar, who with La casa tapiada from Comanegra continued to uncover the Great Betrayal that was the supposed Transition to democracy… These three recent and powerful proposals could be studied as one of the most important political trilogies of recent decades. In summary, La nit by Joan Cavallé is a masterful novel.