Dynamic and worldly portrait of Ferran Torrent

It is enough to talk for a short while with Ferran Torrent (Sedaví, 1951) to realize that he not only has a very rich collection of anecdotes –personal adventures and misadventures of all kinds, literary and political gossip, a colorful macedoine of human typologies seen up close– but that, furthermore, he unfolds and tells them with an infallible grace. One day that we had gone to one of those pre-Sant Jordi days that publishers organize so that their authors try to sign books in bookstores in large cities near Barcelona, I spent two hours with him in a car –Màrius Serra was driving, Gemma Ventura was also there– and I bombarded him with questions. You cannot tell everything we laughed at with Torrent's answers and stories. Before the end of the journey, I asked him how it was possible that no one had ever proposed to do a book of conversations with him. Torrent replied that yes, they had proposed it to him, and by journalists he respected a lot too, but that he was putting them off. In the end, it seems that the journalist and writer Salvador Ortells Miralles (Sueca, 1977) has been able to convince him. It is good news.

Ferran Torrent. Between books and life is not a volume of conversations, even though the raw material from which it is made are the guided interviews and informal conversations that Ortells has held with the author of Thanks for the tip during the last two years. Nor is it exactly a biography, because it does not have the desire for exhaustiveness nor the documentary density nor the diversity of sources nor the will for complete reconstruction of a past that biographies must have. What kind of book can we say it is, therefore? A literary portrait, or a profile with the air of a reportage. Ortells' goal is to offer a direct, more or less essential, dynamic, and exhaustive approach to Ferran Torrent, both from a personal point of view –character, biography, professional trajectory, people with whom he has associated, environments in which he has lived and through which he moves– as well as literary –works, themes, techniques, genres, evolution of style and interests.

An author who enjoys writing

The Ferrant Torrent presented to us by Ortells is a man already well into his seventies, who has just overcome two significant ordeals from which he still bears fears and sequelae—prostate cancer and the traumatic impact of the DANA—yet who feels and appears as vital and full of life as ever. Furthermore, he is a writer who has enjoyed considerable popular recognition and critical prestige for many decades, and who, even so, continues to write daily and publish at a steady pace, and who, moreover, shows that he still finds pleasure in doing so.

Two interesting aspects of Ortells' portrait are how he presents the construction of Torrent's literary vocation, a vocation so strong and focused that it made him decide quite early on to try to become a professional, and how he makes us see the numerous crossovers between his life and his work, both regarding the landscapes he knows and later writes about (the towns of Horta Sud, the city of Valencia) and regarding the human fauna he meets and later portrays (politicians, businessmen, picturesque village folk, and elusive figures from the underworld). A third quite central aspect, derived from the first two, is how the Valencian reality in which Torrent was shaped as a person and as a writer has been totally disfigured, on the verge of extinction.

Although it is a portrait of Torrent, the prominence of the book is shared by the subject and the author of the book, who gives his opinion, shows himself to be interventionist, and does not refrain from speculating and making long digressions. In this sense, Ortells' prose is agile and effective, and the observations he makes about the subject's literary universe are pertinent (crime novel, sociopolitical novel, novel with autobiographical touches), and he manages to capture well the worldly hedonism of Torrent, but, even so, the reader is left wanting to delve deeper into certain issues, for example the writer's relationships with the editors Eliseu Climent and Jaume Vallcorba and with the businessman Paco Roig or his involvement in political Valencianism. The book is completed with an epilogue by the critic and professor Enric Iborra.