From a dung bucket to angel wings

A novel in which corpses send racy love letters, dusty portraits suffer from verbosity, Neapolitan uncles who levitate if they utter subordinate clauses, cousins with a fury to fuck horns in original shapes, witches who become old maids who are oracular poets and speculate in abandoned convents, nuns who steal works of art, wives who abandon husbands to sleep with bishops because of beautiful calligraphy and the possibility that Adolf Hitler survived and hid in the sanctuary of Lluc for a while to escape from the Allied troops... adventures that take place in one of the most fascinating, fun and well-written novels I've read this season, a sensational Fellini-esque phantasmagoria.

From the first page of his new narrative work, Gallery of Solitudes In Nueva Editorial Moll, it is abundantly clear that Gabriel Janer Manila is a master of writing: for the restrained yet precise description of his perfectly portrayed main and secondary characters, for his mastery of the dosage of information, for the construction of solemn and precious phrases alongside unexpected sentences that combine different expressive registers that take advantage of all the possibilities of the language without ever losing a unified and coherent tone with the plot and subplots and everything it tells us, despite the astonishing proliferation of implausible plots, which only reinforce the narrative flow. Between the grotesque and the twilight agony, like a portentous breath opera, this novel moves, captivating with its roughness, humor, and encyclopedic wisdom, although following the methodology of Borges and Cunqueiro y Perucho. Janer Manila bases himself on real historical events to masterfully reinvent them, offering other stories of History. And it all makes sense because this crazy adventure, both realistic and magical, where we find the full range of human behaviors—from a bucket of manure to angel wings—describes the intrinsic, almost blood-borne schizophrenia that we Mediterranean inhabitants, inhabitants of a mixed melting pot of civilizations, suffer from.

Gallery of Solitudes It should be the perfect excuse to reread Gabriel Janer Manila and place him in his rightful place: among the best contemporary writers of Catalan literature – more Neapolitan than Sicilian, if possible – of the 20th and 21st centuries.