Albert Sanchez Piñol sends Puigdemont and Junqueras to hunt Moby Dick

Barcelona"Sometimes people tell me I write books like they used to, and I think they're just like they always were," he said this afternoon. Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​1965) at the Museu Marítim, the chosen venue to present After the shipwreckThis is the first novel he has published with Univers – an imprint of Abacus Futur – after 25 years with La Campana. Despite changing literary trends and generational shifts, Sánchez Piñol remains faithful to the adventure novels that shaped him as a child and allowed him, thanks to Cold skin (La Campana, 2002), achieved unprecedented success in Catalan literature. If that novel, set on a remote island, had echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson, in Pandora in the Congo (The Bell, 2005) resonated within it Joseph Conrad, which has appeared in other books by the author. In After the shipwreckThe tribute is another great classic of the 19th century, Herman Melville

The novel arrives in a hardcover volume with dozens of illustrations by Franc Aleu "created using artificial intelligence, an instrument as valid as any other," argued Sánchez Piñol, who has dared to resume one of the best-known novels Moby DickWith this work, he earned the incomprehension of much of the critics of the time and the rejection of readers. That treatise on anthropology and love for cetaceans, one of which was obsessively pursued by Captain Ahab, ended up becoming one of the literary monuments of the 19th century, although by then Melville had already stopped writing novels and had turned to epic poetry. "I hope to sell several more copies than the few hundred Melville sold when he published Moby Dick"," jokes Sánchez Piñol, who begins After the shipwreck at the point where the American ends his novel. The whale has crushed the ship carrying Ahab and his crew, and the narrator of the story, Ishmael, speaks again. Now known as Ishmael Coficofin, he will explain to the readers how he rescues the LoniaA ship abandoned in misfortune, following an erratic course, and unfortunate enough to have a captain as reckless as Ahab.

Adventures and Politics

"It's a book that condenses much of Albert's narrative: symbolic elements, unsettling atmospheres, philosophical reflections, and irony," commented Ester Pujol, editorial director of Univers.Moby Dick "It has fascinated me because it's a very rare classic," says Sánchez Piñol. "It has an unusual writing style: hundreds of pages that seem to have been taken from a documentary." National GeographicIt speaks of the relationship between nature and culture. Also of the impossible.” One of the characteristics that most caught Sánchez Piñol’s attention in Melville’s book when he first read it was that “both the protagonist, Ishmael, and the antagonist, the whale, survived.” Melville had already foreseen in his novel that Ishmael would be rescued by another ship. Sánchez sees it as “the realm of political fable,” just as he had done Jonathan Swift to Gulliver's Travels

"The most fantastical of my novels is the least imaginative," the author has admitted. "The events we've lived through gave me all the material I needed to move forward." Sánchez Piñol writes about the struggle for power based on the Coficofin experience. Lonia“If we compare it to the current situation in the United States, it’s easy to see how Democrats and Republicans are fighting for control of the ship while the monster is coming up from behind,” he added. “Trump’s rise to power spurred me on to continue Moby Dick"He admits, before describing the current US president as "the orange orangutan." The political parallel with the Catalan independence movement is also evident: the two captains in the book could be Puigdemont and Junqueras. "Literature isn't for cowards," says Sánchez Piñol. "We have the right to view political events through novels: if for me the look at the Process began with Victus [2012], now I'm closing it somehow with After the shipwreck"

The writer assures that the characters of After the shipwreck They are "literarily interesting, more ambivalent and political, both in terms of their relationship with each other and with Moby Dick," he continues. "Perhaps they could have killed the whale, but they didn't, some readers will say. This could be applied to a sociological phenomenon that I was very tempted to explore." The monstrosity of Moby Dick "stinks, but at the same time it inspires dreams." It is an invulnerable animal. "It is evil in a political sense, an evil that exists and attacks us," the author remarks. It drags along all the victims it has swallowed, among them Captain Ahab. Ishmael, the narrator of the story, is "the only one who wants to stay out of attacking the whale, but he will end up wielding the harpoon."

In Sánchez Piñol's novel, "the two captains shirk responsibility, but the whale will eventually catch them: it is too big to escape." Why do they shirk it? "At one point, Ishmael asks the captain of the same question." LoniaAnd he replies that he doesn't want to endanger the crew. Ishmael retorts, "Why, then, have they set sail from the port?" The author of After the shipwreck He says that if the reader wants to know his political stance, they will have to read the novel. A clue: some of the photos he took at the Maritime Museum are in front of a boat named Republic

Regarding the role of artificial intelligence in the book, he defended the method "of an artist like Franc Aleu," but acknowledged that we are reaching a dangerous boundary. "I'm publishing long before artificial intelligence makes me retire," he said. "When I started using it to test it, I thought the machine would master the language, but wouldn't understand the content: I was wrong. Right now, AI knows better than 90% of writers how a story begins and ends." Even so, in the texts he creates, fortunately, and for the moment, "there is no substance, suffering, or anguish." We are "at that crossroads where human and artificial intelligence still collaborate." This pact, like any political negotiation, can be broken at any moment.