Pere Antoni Pons: "Democratic Spain is heir to many identity disfigurations"

BarcelonaThe reader who starts Les conseqüències (Proa, 2026), the fifth novel by Pere Antoni Pons (Campanet, 1980), will have trouble stopping reading the story, magnetic, intriguing, and crafted with great skill, of a writer and journalist who, after his divorce and in the midst of a complex new romantic relationship, resumes contact with an old high school friend who will propose he investigate the mysterious visit to Mallorca of two Nazi officers in the middle of the Second World War. This is the starting point of a book that is devoured while following the adventures of a middle-aged man who, in parallel to his vital disorientation, knows how to unearth links between the fascism of the 1940s, the far-right groups that surfaced during the Transition, and the current resurgence of an ultraconservative radicalism. Three and a half years after Contra el món (Empúries, 2023), Les conseqüències confirms the skill and ambition of Pons, a poet, narrator, and literary critic (at ARA) who knows how to combine the speed required by a thriller with the digestion demanded by a novel of ideas, concerned with the anti-democratic and neoliberal drift of our present.

If the reader were to spend some time on it, they could choose the aphorisms you drop in the middle of Les conseqüències and which further enrich the experience of discovering the story you tell. One of those I wanted to comment on is this: "I love my people and I do my job". Why are both things so important to the protagonist? Is it also for you?

— The entire novel is a great whirlwind of doubts, inquisitions, self-interrogations, blows, and nebulas, and this sentence is a kind of distillate of existential lucidity. The two essential things that justify a life are loving your people and doing your work. If you do not do them, you will hardly feel that life is worth living. If you are not capable of loving your people, it is terrifying. And if you do not do your work, you become a kind of useless ghost, right? When I speak of work, I am not just referring to productivity, but also to an ethical, existential, and daily point. I myself would find it unbearable if I did not have the feeling that I love my people and am doing my work. Another thing is that sometimes I do not love them as well as I would like and that I do not do the work as well as perhaps I should or as I would like it to turn out, but that is another matter, right?

Do you think that in The Consequences you put your protagonist and narrator against the ropes from the first page?

— I place him in a complicated life moment. He has just divorced a woman with whom he did not have a relationship that was in any way degraded and he is involved with a woman whom he also loves, but he knows that due to various circumstances, commitments, and divergences of destiny it is impossible for him to give her what she wants or expects, or for him to be able to put on the table what is necessary for that relationship to work. All this quagmire of doubts and discomforts of the character came while I was already writing. The starting point of the novel was another one.

The intrigue that drives the action?

— The most novelistic idea of all: that the Nazis came to Mallorca searching for something that for us, the Mallorcans, reminds us of folk tales and, therefore, is part of our roots. I thought I would explore this starting point by avoiding closed and archetypal genre codes and giving it an authorial dimension. It immediately occurred to me that to ground the story in reality, I would talk about the missing list of Chuetas made during the Second World War and add a component of autofiction. I wrote in a frantic and boisterous way, with the feeling that I had in my hands two apparently incompatible materials: that of the intrigue, adventure, and historical novel with a political dimension and this very personal side.

It shows that you like reading Emmanuel Carrère.

— Yes, but unlike him I have not wanted to be exhibitionist, confessional, or immodest. I have wanted to disguise myself a lot between the pages.

"I had undone my marriage so as not to have a predictable life forever more, and now I was navigating a swamp of predictability." These are the words of the protagonist and narrator, who seems immersed in a midlife crisis after recently turning 40.

— I show how the character lives the consequences of the decisions made during the crisis. The title refers to these personal consequences, but also and above all to the political consequences of a good part of the events narrated therein. Instead of showing the great hurricane of the character's life, the great rift and the turning point, I focus on the post-crisis. Against the world dealt more with this previous episode.

If we review the five novels you have written, we will find vital stages that correspond to your own. The first, La felicitat dels dies tristos (Empúries, 2010), was set during university years. The protagonist was a great reader, who let himself be fascinated by characters like Jay Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, and Holden Caulfield. In Les conseqüències, the protagonist continues to love literature and tries to write a new novel, but adds a few disappointments and literary failures, a bit like what happened in Si t'hi atreveixes (Empúries, 2014).

— Each novel fits more or less with the vital moment in which I was writing it, which I do not see only on a personal level, but generationally. With the first one it was perhaps a bit different, because I wrote it when I had already closed the university stage, but I was interested in making an initiation novel of a classic cut and with a heightened lyrical tone.

When you debuted as a novelist you had already published three poetry collections. The first, El verí dels àngels (Lleonard Muntaner, 1999), arrived when you were only 19 years old. You must have just started English philology at the University of Barcelona. How come you chose this degree?

— I was a fan of American literature and culture. I already liked classic Hollywood a lot, I was interested in certain painters from the 40s and 50s—such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning—and I had read a lot of North American literature when I entered university.

Don't you share this hobby with anyone?

— No. In Campanet I used to share playing football obsessively, going cycling... We made a lot of noise, that is to say, we always had things going on. I understood very soon that talking about literature with friends only led me to frustration. I got pragmatic and came to Barcelona to study a degree that we didn't have in Mallorca at the time. I was lucky enough to meet up again with Melcior Comes: we had shared our first year of high school, but afterwards we hadn't remained friends. One day we started chatting leaving the Filmoteca, after watching La dolce vita, by Fellini, and we just couldn't stop. We still chat often and share many things.

Jay Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, characters who appear in The Happiness of Sad Days, star in books by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger, respectively. Were they three important authors, for you?

— The three characters served me in the novel to explore the idea of purity in a puritanical sense, which obsessed me when I was young. Holden Caulfield represents the purity of childhood, which is obviously spoiled. Huckleberry Finn is the purity of pre-civilized nature, which civilization destroys. Gatsby represents the idea of the dream and utopia: if you scratch a little, behind it there is filth, baseness, and mediocrity. Over the years I have realized that the purity that interests me is the dirty kind, the one that is wounded. In The Consequences there is a moment where it talks about how good cleanliness is what occurs after the filth. A full life is only possible after many ups and downs. There is no vital or existential ecstasy in itself.

Did English philology set you on the path toward this full life that, to a greater or lesser extent, we all seek?

— I ended up very frustrated with my degree, because it was heavily crossed by issues coming from cultural studies in the most militant and ideological sense. Queer and postcolonial literature was explained in a very dogmatic and textbook-like way. It made me sick to read such supersophisticated articles that, deep down, didn't say much of anything. And I was annoyed by the hypocrisy of problematizing the history of the English and Americans through postcolonial literature while being incapable of applying it to the Catalan and Spanish situation. I ended up being a bad student... And the year I went to Belfast on Erasmus was more interesting in terms of life experiences than academic ones. I shared an apartment with a Catholic and a Protestant, and that allowed me to learn many things.

In The consequences there are very diverse political convictions that confront each other: Spanish nationalism, independence aspirations, old communism and the far right.

— I conceive the novel as a debate of ideas that clash and struggle, not as an explanation of why some ideas are good and others are bad.

The echoes of fascism from the 40s and 70s in contemporary Mallorca are exemplified through the figure of a father and son in the novel: Rodrigo Pons Palmer and Rodrigo Pons Cabezas.

— At this point there are two aspects regarding identity terms. There is a sign of a Mallorcan identity that is increasingly interfered with and de-Mallorcanized. This can be seen, for example, in the inability to gradually assume the legacy and memory of what we have been. You are defined by the memory you have, and also by how rooted you are in one place or another. Then we have the political reality, and the novel talks about Mallorca but it can be applied to the entire Spanish state, that 2026 is the consequence of many things, or is a reality made of a handful of consequences. Now there is a lot of talk about the rise of the far right. It would not be possible if Santiago Abascal were not the heir to the Aznar of the early 2000s, who at the same time was the political son of Manuel Fraga, founder of Alianza Popular. And Fraga was the son of the Francoist opening, which he did not assume out of democratic conviction, but because of the international context, personal interest, and the economic benefits it could provide.

The novel examines this genealogy in depth and reaches the years of the Civil War.

— The Francoist reformists of the 60s were the heirs of the Francoists who had executed and murdered people during three years of Civil War, and if they won this war it was because a certain Adolf Hitler supported them. Democratic Spain is the heir to many violences and many identity and ideological disfigurements.

Fascism and the far right are inextricably intertwined, in The consequences.

— The far right is often spoken of as if it were something that has nothing to do with fascism or democracy, when the reality is quite different. Often, fascism takes two or three natural components of democracy and turns up the heat. The banal nationalism of states at a high temperature can end up drifting into fascism. I wanted to explain all this in the novel, avoiding endless dialogues between the characters and presenting situations, plots, and conflicts.

As a reader, I admit that I have had to keep stopping, because the pace is so fast that it is easy to gain a lot of speed and miss all the details.

— Two influences that were decisive for me as a child were Indiana Jones and the Tintin comics. I would say that in The consequences they are there, in one way or another, right?

It seemed to me that I saw both influences. Like in a Tintin or Indiana Jones adventure, your character delves into an increasingly unusual and bizarre plot that leads him to experience unexpected escapades.

— Classic Hollywood film noir also blew my mind since I was 10 or 12 years old. Fritz Lang, John Huston, Billy Wilder, William Wyler... In parallel, popular genres like horror, intrigue, and adventure fascinated me. Two novels that drove me crazy back then were Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe. I wasn't a great reader: I was basically with friends, playing soccer, riding my bike here and there. I remember myself as a guy who was half-injured all day long.

Thirty years later, you have published about twenty books and hundreds of literary reviews. During this last decade, you have combined creation with raising your two children. At what point are you now?

— For some years now, I have been experiencing a rather considerable kind of full vitality. Sometimes I get monumentally annoyed, I get disappointed, or I am very sad... but I always keep the desire to do things. I have the feeling that work and the children fill me so much that until they are completely emancipated and start to move on from their parents, I will hardly be able to incorporate significant things into my life, beyond what I already have: my family, half a dozen friends, my two kids, and my literary vocation. I have never been nostalgic, but now I live more than ever in the day-to-day, at most a week ahead. I am very rooted in a frantic present and self-centered on my people and work.

The character in the novel is seen as a monk locked up all day with his obsession for writing. You too?

— I combine monastic life with three or four hedonistic impulses.