<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Narrative]]> 10 <![CDATA[What is a mother capable of?]]> Many literary constructions are, in reality, the happy result of having managed to overcome technical challenges, that is to say, creative artifacts built upon hurdles that have enhanced, as the members of Oulipo always knew, know, and will know, the increasingly less secret motors of writing. The novel A Void, by Georges Perec, which we can enjoy in English thanks to the publisher Dalkey Archive Press with a masterful translation by Gilbert Adair, is one of the greatest examples of this: a fabulous story in which the author does not use any word that contains the letter E. No joke. However, let us not forget that forms as commonly used as sonnets or sestinas are, also, formal complications that invite us to overcome obstacles to convey the content we wish to express. 

]]> <![CDATA[Opening up with Herman Melville's Typee]]> Quid Pro Quo had already recovered The Encantadas, by Herman Melville, in a magnificent translation by Pep Julià, a sublime volume that the admired writer J. L. Badal had recommended to me with emphasis and with good reason. Now the beloved publisher from Pollença insists on this happy recovery operation with a Melville that is worth reading beyond Moby Dick, a marvel more than deservedly famous that has achieved universal fortune. However, Melville is much more than Moby Dick: it is one of the great bastions of modern American literature, an author capable of transmuting adventure, travel, the sea, nature, violence, and the clash between cultures into supreme literary matter. Typee, his first published book, written based on experiences lived during his years of sailing the South Seas, invites us to rediscover the power of a genius who already from the beginning possessed a more than ambitious literary capacity.Typee is a formidable adventure story, but it would be unfair to reduce it to just that. Herman Melville constructs a narrative in which the experience of an exotic world is readjusted as a profound exploration of the clash between cultural systems. The writer observes the customs, rituals, hierarchies, sensuality, and violence of this new world with a fascinating combination of curiosity, irony, and descriptive capacity, and turns estrangement into a laboratory for the radical displacement of one's gaze. Here we find a still-young Melville, yet already possessed of an astonishing faculty for transforming external adventure into moral and intellectual learning. Teresa Bauçà Bosch's translation has the merit of keeping such energy alive, of making a text flow that demands agility but also precision, and of preserving the tension between descriptive exuberance, the sense of adventure, and the concerns that mark the work. Bauçà Bosch—who has already translated authors such as Wells, Tagore, Turgenev, Hawthorne, Emerson, Mary Shelley, and Dickens—once again demonstrates marked solvency here.We must defend this literature with enthusiasm, the kind that takes you far, the kind that brings you closer to unknown territories and, above all, the kind that changes our way of looking at things. Typee belongs to the lineage of books that help us re-mem-ber why we read classics: not because they are excellent museum pieces but because they challenge, move, and teach us. Quid Pro Quo, which has built much of its catalog on a determined commitment to recovering totems that maintain a fertile contemporary dialogue, offers a new and brilliant opportunity to return to the immense Melville. Enjoying Typee is to penetrate other lives, different and striking, a creative and empathetic possibility that confirms an enormous, complex, contradictory, and beautiful world, just what we need in these chaotic times full of absurd fear and hatred.

]]> <![CDATA[Of truths there are many]]> A novel permeated by the breath of William Faulkner and the darkness of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. A novel constructed from the investigation of narratological mechanisms, full of perspectives and contradictions, in the manner of the prodigious Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. A novel with golden voices like those of the enigmatic and sick characters of Clarice Lispector. A novel that dialogues with international literature but is made in our land, and with beautiful winks to masters from here like Mercè Rodoreda and Jaume Cabré. A novel, indeed, that speaks tellurically of the territory, digging its fingers like roots into an extreme and fascinating land. A novel that seems like History because it has known how to use the gears of fiction, a precious lie, to reach raw human truths. A powerful, polyphonic, and wild novel. A novel that exists: Bèsties en el foc, by Joan Roure, published by La Magrana. This formidable work rises like a verbal cathedral of almost mystical intensity, a dark and incandescent song that originates from Ponent – a land that is not a backdrop, but rather energetically nourishes the author's imagination and imbues the work with a moral and symbolic density that dialogues with the rawness of the multiplied history that unfolds – to become a radical exploration of memory, guilt, and uncertainty. Through the voices of Mateu, Ramon, and Carme, the narrative unfolds like a choral architecture of devastating power where abused childhood becomes a witness and the word, a form of redemption. With a landscape of mists and silences that becomes almost another character, Joan Roure constructs a story of forbidden loves, hidden passions, and long-concealed confessions that, upon emerging, devastate everything. The novel is a burning immersion into the darkest corners of the human soul, where madness and lucidity touch, and where literature, in its most sublime gesture, becomes a form of poetic justice capable of illuminating what time had condemned to muteness. The themes it touches upon are most interesting: how wounded consciences add fuel to the bath of traumas that bog down spirits, various forms of emotional and physical survival in times of misery, political dissent, resistance networks, and the rough friction of opposing viewpoints not as a communicative impossibility but as an expression of the chaos that grounds us. For all these reasons, Bèsties de foc, by Joan Roure, is an admirable narrative artifact where truth is never univocal and the reader is invited to inhabit ambiguity, to read between the lines, and to enjoy the terrible and beautiful mysteries of the world and of life. Without a doubt, an essential book from now on.

]]> <![CDATA[I need wings to fly]]> With his first film (The 400 Blows), François Truffaut began a cinematic cycle starring a fictional character (Antoine Doinel, alter ego of Truffaut himself) who embodied different films, always played by the same actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud). From this filmed continuum, the beloved French filmmaker was able to explore the complex and exciting paths of a human being's life. I thought of this artistic example while reading Pere Joan Martorell's new and ambitious novel, Nits sense ales (Nights without wings) from Pagès Editors, as through its pages we can once again encounter a character who has starred in other works by the Lloseta writer, such as the Llibre de les revelacions (Book of Revelations) (Editorial Moll, 2007), because Amador is, in effect, Martorell's correspondent in possible parallel and quantum universes. In a literary adventure that connects him with Solenoide, by Mircea Cărtărescu, Pere Joan Martorell does not recreate his life in the mirror of fiction, but reinvents it from turning points that could have occurred, and thus recovers Amador, a psychologist and writer in a center dedicated to behavioral disorders. But every story begins with a turning point, that is, with a change, a disorder, and it is here when the appearance of Judith, a young woman marked by a past of brutal violence and abuse, activates a narrative mechanism of high emotional tension. Her voice, which emerges with difficulty between shame and urgency, challenges the therapist and destabilizes him to the point of forcing him to confront his own limits. It is then that the work unfolds like a progressive infernal descent towards the most opaque zones of the mind and society, with a highly symbolic language and images of powerful impact. The world that is drawn around the characters, with the presence of a sordid network of domination and exploitation, is not merely a setting that draws from a real case: it acts as an amplifier of internal conflicts. But what truly sustains the novel is its formidable ability to show how evils are not only external, but above all intimate, embedded in memory and the body. Martorell develops a story that skillfully moves through the margins of moral ambiguity, exploring the fine line that separates compassion from desire.With a ductile and intensely expressive prose, which knows how to alternate sharp cuts with moments of restorative delicacy, Nits sense ales, by Pere Joan Martorell, is a striking account of vulnerability and the search for redemption, a novel that delves without concessions into the most fragile and uncomfortable territories of human experience, where wound and desire are confused and where the need for empathy becomes almost a matter of survival.

]]> <![CDATA[I think about it, but I wish I didn't.]]> Joan Perelló is—and we can say this with pride—one of the most valuable poets we have in Mallorca specifically, and in the Catalan Countries in general, but in recent years he has also proven himself to be a prose writer with a sharp wit, a dry plot, and a truly first-rate style. The truth is, both his short stories and his novels have always thrilled me; they taste of gin, smell of strong tobacco, and read like classic literature. That's why I'm somewhat pleased that Ensiola Editorial is once again backing this writer of red-hot streets and rough-hewn stone, who returns with a collection of short stories that reads like a novel and has a beautiful, unflinching, and perfect title: Intruder's air

]]> <![CDATA[Marta Fernández: "Whoever invented the 'scroll' probably regrets it."]]>

Content creator and trainer in audiovisual techniques and narratives Marta Fernández believes that the person who invented thescroll –swiping up, down, or sideways with a finger on a screen to see more content– is something he regrets. This technique, which allows users to view a large amount of content in a short time, has affected citizens' attention spans, which are now "very short because we've become accustomed to endless consumption," according to Fernández. "We're not even capable of reading a book," he laments.

]]> <![CDATA[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.

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