Bloodfield

Haceldama It is an Aramaic word (AkeldamaThe title, which means 'field of blood,' refers to the piece of land bought with Judas's coins that would later become a cemetery for foreigners. It is also the title of Blai Bonet's second and so unjustly maligned novel, which now sees the light of day again thanks to a meticulous edition by Nicolau Dols for Club Editor, a publishing house that has already managed to recover each and every one of the author's published novels. The goal is twofold, as the work breathes again with the original voice conceived by the unbridled novelist, without the excessive and unnecessary corrections it suffered at Editorial Aymá and which had dragged Ensiola into the reissue. Therefore, we are witnessing a noble act of literary recovery, but also a true celebration that arrives at the beginning of this Blai Bonet Year, which has barely begun. Thus, we are witnessing a cultural event of the first magnitude.

What Nicolau Dols and Club Editor achieve is not only to rescue an often undervalued book, but also to restore a voice and a body of work, giving readers back access to a great creator who has too often been read as peripheral and eccentric when, in reality, he is a radiant and fertile genius who embodies the works and miracles of Blai Bonet. HaceldamaThus, Bonet returns to the new releases scene in all his grandeur, reminding us that Catalan literature is also capable of taking risks, of shaking things up, and of enabling other perspectives, other styles, other ways of doing things. The tragic, Camusian story of Andreu Crous doesn't advance like a martial column, but rather like a constellation formed from scattered pieces seemingly disjointed by the violence of the narrative. Bonet articulates the plot in a fragmentary and polyphonic way, as if the world could only be explained through a plurality of voices, registers, and perspectives. The scenes overlap like layers in an Antoni Tàpies impasto painting, ultimately defining a composition that is neither flat nor univocal. This structure, which some would call postmodern and others visionary, functions almost like a 'collage'These fragments, once connected, reveal the character's heightened inner world and the brutality of life. This vibrant puzzle confirms that no identity is fixed but rather a process, a struggle, and a breath born from verbal outbursts.

Blai Bonet was a unique meteorite of disconcerting, sensual, and radically modern intensity in Catalan literature, and (re)reading 'Haceldama'should be one of the strict and happy obligations of this year.