<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - novel]]> 10 <![CDATA[Against the long and dark night of Francoism]]> You don't need to be a firefly to realize that the pendulum of History is once again swinging towards a repugnant rise of the right and far-right, a real shame that confirms that human beings are an idiotic animal that stumbles many times on the same stone. Faced with this, and even though it sometimes seems that Catalan literature tends to forget particular and collective realities, there are snipers who refuse to succumb to general inertia and misery. This is the happy case of a writer by birth who, in fact, does not conceive of life without writing: Joan Cavallé. The prolific and respected author from Tarragona publishes a new, magnificent and necessary novel, "La nit" (Angle Editorial). Full of symbols, metaphors, documentation, and winks at great works of universal culture, "La nit" consciously invites us to delve into the long and dark night of Francoism and the horror of a cruel and murderous dictatorship dominated by His Excellency, the oldest tyrant in Europe, as wisely called by Joan Brossa, so skillful that, despite passing away, he did it well enough to weave the vile business in such a way that everything remained tied up and well-tied. Thus begins Cavallé's journey: after a verse by Raimon that gives the volume its title, we penetrate the orbits of a young student who participates in a clandestine network and has a mission to carry out in stages, he is our Virgil in a social hell founded on fear.In addition to the courage to break silences, traumas, and mutisms, and to tell truths like temples related to the terrible present, La nit by Joan Cavallé demonstrates other high values: the ability to trace a psychogeographic map of a resistant Tarragona; the gift of dialoguing with an eternally revisited classic like James Joyce's Ulysses; the superb control of tempos and narratological rhythms when combining external landscape with internal introspection; the firm and perfect mastery of each sentence; expressiveness… Each page is marked with a high capacity to generate interest, suspense, exhilarating intensity. For all these reasons, La nit is a great novel and an unexpected surprise of this season that I will never tire of recommending.Joan Cavallé, fortunately, is not alone: there are other literary samurai such as Eduard Márquez, who did a radiography of this era with the colossal volume 1969 from L’Altra Editorial; or Julià de Jòdar, who with La casa tapiada from Comanegra continued to uncover the Great Betrayal that was the supposed Transition to democracy… These three recent and powerful proposals could be studied as one of the most important political trilogies of recent decades. In summary, La nit by Joan Cavallé is a masterful novel. 

]]> <![CDATA["The violence that any desire entails is uncomfortable"]]>

The Majorcan poet Marcos Augusto debuts as a novelist with Te hice dios (Random House), a work that explores desire, illness, guilt, and moral limits through a story that is as uncomfortable as it is ambitious. Two men meet in a chat looking for sex, but the encounter goes further: one wants to infect himself with HIV —he is one of the so-called bug chasers— and the other promises him that he will. It is the starting point of a relationship marked by destructive impulses, lies, and the need to love and give meaning to loss. We talk to the author about literature, love, and the limits of fiction.

]]> <![CDATA[The legacies that slumber within us]]> Corcs, by Olívia Lund at Nova Editorial Moll, is a singular literary irruption, a first novel that is far from early, which addresses memories, recollection, inheritance, and identity from a radically lively and imaginative perspective. Through the figure of Glòria, the protagonist, the author constructs a tangle of stories in which the different pasts are not closed-off or disconnected territories, but a single invisible and active presence that beats beneath the complex and chaotic present surface. The repeated gestures, obsessions, words, condemnations, and extravagances of previous generations emerge unexpectedly, as if every family construct were made of organic matter that never ceases to transform in the alchemy of metamorphoses. Lund turns latent legacies into a very powerful force that traverses bodies, spaces, and epochs, and suggests that what we consider intimately ours is often also the echo of many other existences that have preceded us, a philosophical precept that would fit with Nietzschean conceptions of eternal return.One of the novel's successes is the way it dissolves the boundaries between historical times, personal experiences, and individual or collective imaginaries. Tumultuous loves, disappointments, episodes of madness, family myths, and popular legends coexist in the same stream that advances with visionary energy made of furious gusts, furiously lyrical, steeped in Faulkner and Lispector, in Blai Bonet and Antònia Vicens. Far from any accommodating folklorism, Corcs opts for good folklore in a disturbing and complex exploration of narratological mechanisms, delving into the landscapes of delirium, unconscious transmissions, and psycho-emotional persistences that shape us. All this is sustained by a very expressive language, rooted in the land but at the same time extraordinarily flexible, capable of combining poetic density and narrative intensity with thoughtful depth. It is quite normal that the great Antònia Vicens praises this formidable debut.With this first published work, and with a few awards under her belt, Olívia Lund confirms literary ambition and her own voice: she knows how to dialogue with ultralocal and universal traditions without getting bogged down. Corcs is a novel that digs into the deepest layers of collectivity, into the secrets and genetic codes that all lineages preserve, to reveal their shadows, wounds, and wonders, and it does so with a formal audacity and imaginative power that turn the reading into an absorbing experience. Nova Editorial Moll thus incorporates into its catalog an author who seems destined to occupy a prominent place among the new voices of current and future Catalan literature.

]]> <![CDATA[Pere Carbonell wins the Vila de Ascó prize with a novel set in Mallorca]]>

The writer Pere Carbonell has won the 38th Vila d’Ascó Literary Award with the novel Bombolles de xampany, a work that combines satire, acid humor, and criticism of personal relationships in the context of a party night.

]]> <![CDATA[Ibiza publisher seeks geeks who want to write novels]]>

It doesn't come from pop, nor from polp. ‘Pulp’ comes from pulp, from the wood pulp that was used in the first half of the 20th century in the United States to print absolutely over-the-top horror or science fiction stories that are typical of the genre. The paper was coarse, brownish, very ugly, very cheap. The content, too: Martians abducting a family on a lonely rural property, a city sunk into the sea and ruled by robots, a comet carrying spectral warriors from another dimension...

]]> <![CDATA[Art and parity]]> Following the recent awarding of the prize for best novel of the year, the controversy surrounding the underrepresentation of women in the shortlist of ten nominated novels has resurfaced. Although the winner was a woman, Antònia Carré-Pons, she made sure to point out in her acceptance speech that there were only two novels written by women on the list of ten finalists (which included a novel by the author of this piece). Did it include me, or did it include my novel? Those who seem to have a certain notion of parity are the very juries that compile these lists. If women publish four out of every ten books, at least this proportion should be reflected in the awards and distinctions, unless we are being told that they do a worse job—which we perhaps cannot deduce if they are ultimately the ones honored…

]]> <![CDATA[Exaltations Gabriel Caballero]]> It seemed that Julià de Jòdar had, in a Pasolinian fashion, renounced writing after the colossal and unclassifiable novel. The deserter on the battlefield in Proa. But he returned. And what a return! All thanks to the gentle persistence of the Comanegra Publishing team, who invited him to perpetrate The vulnerable, prequel to the great trilogy Chance and shadows, which continued to stir the tail with the Orson Wellesian volume The boarded-up houseTherefore, it wasn't a triptych but a whole saga, which now expands, to our delight, with The sleepless nightsHowever, during this waiting period, Julià de Jòdar's pen has continued to stir, and it has done so with two remarkable volumes: Gabriel Caballero Variations in Puente del petróleo (the most outstanding examples of its Badalona psychogeography) in The murmur from the borders Ensiola (a collection of some twenty high-caliber literary articles). Not to mention the collective volume, coordinated and edited by Júlia Ojeda, which was published by Lleonard Muntaner, Editor: The Forging of Days: Critical Approaches to the Work of Julià de JòdarNo joke.

]]> <![CDATA[Curious creatures]]> Within the framework of international criticism, a unanimous consensus has been reached: it is considered that Rotten creaturesAmy Twigg's literary debut is a subversive, extraordinarily well-written novel, a work that elevates the category of cult literature. Therefore, it is a brilliant and significant achievement that this contemporary marvel is now part of the Ediciones de la Ela Geminada catalog, with a splendid translation by the writer Anna Carreras i Aubets. Interestingly, the title is a quote from a letter that Vita Sackville-West sent to Virginia Woolf, a brilliant correspondence that is another of the undisputed gems in the catalog of this formidable and daring Girona-based publisher.

]]> <![CDATA[Singing is a good way to combat devastation]]> As you wish, brothers, that I sing, Joan Pons Bover's novel, published by Isla Ediciones, is a work of continuous and persistent power that goes in crescendoIt doesn't go for easy effects; rather, it unfolds its multiple narrative strengths as it progresses. Although it may sound cliché, this is indeed a captivating work that you can't put down, and which, like the prodigious film,... One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson's film is a magnificent artistic offering that arrives at an opportune moment, as it also functions as an extremely political, yet subtle, artifact that, with the fury of good fiction, denounces the current state of affairs, devastated by this abominable return of the far right and fascist policies disguised under democratic masks. Thus, with surgical precision, layers of memory and wounded dignity are laid bare.

]]> <![CDATA[Artificial fiction]]> Things seem to be moving very fast. In the field of AI, the devastating impact of technology on employment is becoming increasingly apparent, especially among the tech companies' own workers. It's within the companies that are driving AI development that AI itself is usurping the jobs of programmers, who realize that what they were helping to create was a competitor that would do the same thing they do, but much faster, better, and cheaper. I don't know what might happen to these professionals, although we know that certain technical profiles are highly sought after within tech companies. But all the experts are predicting it, some apocalyptic, others fully integrated into a system they now lament not knowing how to rein in: AI will be a revolution that will turn everything upside down.

]]> <![CDATA[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.

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