The consequences

One of the funniest observations I have been told as a writer is that it must have been easy for me to write, even to "write well", because I am "from Mallorca". As if being "from Mallorca" already made everything easy; we already know that sa Pobla is like Baghdad, and that everyone who lives there or passes through is loaded with stories or romances that are always wonderful and interesting, and that the only thing we writers have to do is listen and get down to work. I thought of this anecdote while reading 'Les conseqüències’, by Pere Antoni Pons, which has just been released by the publisher Proa. The author has been demonstrating for years that he is one of the most solid, trained, and lucid writers in our literature, a pen animal that does not shy away from any genre, and who with a diverse, broad, and total-reach body of work has known how to write memorable verses, and interviews, and build a formidable body of articles. Now Pons returns to the novel after that terrible and haunting fresco that was Contra el món. What the reader will find in Les conseqüències is an apparently autobiographical novel, which does not hide that the narrator and protagonist may also have the traits of the author. A novel about the personal crisis of a creator, of a writer who makes a living writing for newspapers, and who suddenly finds himself facing a great mystery, that is to say, a great story, one of those that can bring fame and fortune to a journalist, or to a novelist if he manages to transform it into a good narrative. The book is seductive for almost the same reason we mentioned: it seems that Mallorca –Campanet– and its past of wonders and horrors are enough to give momentum to a tale that mixes classic intrigue with the most ruthless and dirty diagnosis of current events that we could throw in our faces. The protagonist is looking for a specific story, yes, and for it to be true on top of that, but what he keeps finding, like the king who listened to Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, is another story that complicates the first one, or frames it within another larger and even stranger one. With a more or less classic excuse –clarifying the existence of two probable lists of victims, or the reason for the visit of a Nazi couple to Campanet in 1940– the narrator unfolds a devastating gallery of characters, a direct foray into the darkest circles of the Spanish ultraright in Mallorca. The book will not disappoint either lovers of a traditional adventure or those keen on a more poignant or disruptive narrative, and the fact is that, little by little, as we delve into layers and layers of the mystery, everything becomes more mind-blowing and improbable, until this very impossibility ends up convincing us that we are before the last layer of an unknown reality. It takes a lot of craft to make a novel so easy to read, but which at the same time tries to provide an answer to the mystery of life, power, and love. The Consequences tells us about the madness of writing, of living, and of wanting to know on a Mallorca of the thousand and one nights of insomnia, longing, and adventure.