A great book in modest appearance

For many current Catalan writers, shit is everything. I mean they call it that - generically, shit–, of the different kinds of shit there are in the world, as if it were all the same, either because they have no roots in the countryside (only shadows on the asphalt) or because they have not read enough (or at all) of their own literary tradition. Ramon Erra (Vic, 1966) is a rigorous writer, who has read well (and enough) and who has deep roots in the land. He knows that chicken manure is called hen, and for horse manure, there is only one name: we make. May the guano is the excrementitious matter of bats. It is not bullshit, what I say! Language is the raw material of the writer. Erra also knows what a piss-a-bed is, a wild cock (and he has even seen some!) and a drain – which he writes load, as it should be pronounced in their native region–, and knows how to distinguish between a wheat field and stubble.

What he proposes with this new book is a collection of literary recreations of walks (“"life and books feed each other,” he writes). Narrating is an exercise older than walking, and the writer from Vic does it very well: his consistent bibliography shows that he knows how to construct a good novel (he excels in the genre of the "new), excellent stories and, now, some narrations that are more difficult to categorize, which for me have brought back the memory of the literature of a good friend, the Asturian Xuan Bello. The path behind is, therefore, a collection of texts that have walking as their common thread, but also the memory that this practice unfolds, because the author has been treading these paths and God's ways for years and years. And there is another objective: the reconquest of the forest as a literary space of the first order (think of the relevance that the forest had, for example, for the medieval chivalric novel). “This will be about returning to the forest,” we read in one of these pieces. And about recovering “the possibility of adventure,” which, in another prose, Erra assures us, has died.

Without melancholy

They are always short pieces (three, four pages): some have a certain resemblance to a story; others are closer to travel prose, with an unmistakable lyrical touch. Some of the stories, if they can be called stories, take place in the country, in Catalonia (in the Old Country, of course). Some take place far away, in the United States or, more recently, in France, Wales, or Switzerland. One of the cover pages includes a quote from Josep Maria Espinàs, who had his own theory of ditches. Erra does not remain in the wake of the Barcelonian and, if anything, expands his vision: in his case, there are interesting reflections on ditches and trenches, which connect with his old interest in the Civil War. Another difference between the two authors is that, in Espinàs's case, the recourse to fiction (in a canonical sense: memory is also fiction) is minimal, while Erra never stops exploiting it. Often with the empowering signature of a magnificent final sentence: “I see the red cabin of the aerial cable car far away and it seems like a very strange object.” Sometimes, the last sentence opens up profound possibilities: “Always the photo that will hurt you a little one day.”

A book about memory, but without melancholy. It recreates “that way of ours of living,” the sense of the world specific to youth, but also that of the boy who has become an adult, that of constant discovery (“our region has seemed like a strange world to us”). A fear more stimulating than paralyzing. The words excursió and excurs have, as can be easily guessed, the same root. “Rounds of ambushed memory,” we read in the subtitle: spot on! In its apparent modesty, it is a great book. And so well written!