The powers of literature

It can now be said without a doubt: the author of the 2025/2026 season is Sebastià Alzamora, who with his magnificent poems Sala augusta and Llengua materna, published in a single volume at Proa, has deserved the Critics', Cavall Verd, Serra d’Or, Lletra d’Or, and National awards. But if they have all come at once, it is because he has deserved them for a long time: his is a powerful and forceful work. For example, with the magnificent novel Reis del món he should have received some recognition… However, the paths of books are difficult to discern, and, in my opinion, Reis del món has achieved another alternative triumph: having established another narratology, risky, close to the essay and to the theater, to the thought-provoking disquisition, a path that has now been followed and expanded upon with the admirable first novel by Fausto Puerto Quetglas: Abans que vingui la fosca, at Angle Editorial. And I say “admirable” because it is: incredible that this volume we have in our hands is a debut, because it is excellent.

Fausto Puerto Quetglas is known, not only in his native area of Manacor, for being a nurturing bookseller and publisher thanks to the bookstore and label Món de llibres, an oasis of passion and freedom in the heart of Mallorca. We already knew, then, that he was a passionate man of letters, but now he confirms that he has the hands of a writer. Abans que vingui la fosca is, first and foremost, a philosophical investigation into loss, grief, the passage of time, and memory. In fact, and I believe we are facing a good Zeitgeist that will have to be analyzed carefully, a good part of its themes dialogue vividly with another recent book such as the essay Vestigis. Laberint amb pare en flames, by Lucia Pietrelli, published by AdiA Edicions (1st Blai Bonet prize for contemporary thought). And the fact is that a good part of the literature being written today is the philosophy of our era, and through masterful pages that capture your attention and force you to read without pause, Fausto Puerto Quetglas proposes a character devoted to the philosopher Philipp Mainländer, a radical 19th-century pessimist who defended virginity or suicide as methods to minimize life and suffering, an ideology currently amplified by the dark Thomas Ligotti, who inspired much of the existential nihilism that permeates the first season of True Detective.

In a landscape of desolation, of confrontation with death, the protagonist analyzes Mainländer's ideology and establishes a dialogue with Mathieu Renard. From here arises a great question: does writing heal or help one live? Let everyone think about it. Meanwhile, I can say that Abans que vingui la fosca, by Fausto Puerto Quetglas at Angle Editorial, is an excellent and exemplary novel that inaugurates a trajectory and continues to confirm the powers of literature.