Marta Pasqual: "Having lost someone very important when you were a child marks you"

BarcelonaAlthough she hasn't lost hope of becoming a "skater, pianist, dancer, and screenwriter for Larry David," Marta Pasqual (Girona, 1983) combines teaching in secondary school, where she teaches French literature, with writing novels as interesting as L'àngel que em mira (Empúries, 2026), the third she has published since debuting in fiction with El malaventurat senyor Clauss (Empúries, 2022). After winning the Just M. Casero prize with La casa dels caps de setmana (Empúries, 2023), Pasqual presents a story centered on a 60-year-old family man, Isaac, who suffers a domestic accident that leaves him in a coma. This starting point allows the author to combine the account of this decisive moment in the protagonist's life with the flood of memories, both good and painful, that visit him during his convalescence.

This is an important year for you, literarily speaking: you have published the novel L'àngel que em mira and the translation of Saviesa, by Paul Verlaine (LaBreu). Why did you choose this atypical book in the French author's work?

— Verlaine invented the label of cursed poet and we know him, above all, through his dark and excessive period, related to the loving bond he had with Rimbaud. When things went wrong between them, Verlaine shot him and ended up in prison. It was there that he converted to Catholicism. He needed to forgive himself through God.

Wisdom connects with the spiritual rebirth of some young people.

— I have not translated Verlaine out of Christian devotion, but because of my connection with French literature. He is a very important author in the creation of poetic modernity, but he is still little known in Catalonia.

The first words we read in The Angel Looking at Me are not by Verlaine, but by Thomas Wolfe, from the novel Look Homeward, Angel [Look Homeward, Angel]. Also by Wolfe is The Lost Boy, the nouvelle that the protagonist, Isaac, is reading shortly before he has the accident that will change his life.

— The first one is extremely extensive and I love it. The second one connects directly with the theme of my novel, and it is that having lost someone very important when you were a child marks you.

Isaac was left without his brother, Jordi, when he was 3 years old. He has not been able to overcome it, neither he nor the family.

— Sometimes a trauma is so strong that it prevents you from moving forward. The death of a child ruins the whole family, and also some of those who come after, like the twin sisters that Jordi and Isaac's parents end up having.

The mother loves and hates the son who survived.

— In one of the book's chapters, Isaac walks with his parents and asks them to take him by the hands and swing him around. His mother tells him no and lets go of him roughly. It is very difficult for Isaac to understand his mother's rejection. He says his father's hand is warm and his mother's, icy. He feels the hand he was holding onto his mother's go numb.

It is one of the sad memories that Isaac accumulates within him. At the beginning of the novel we read that "he drags a suitcase full of pain and a void that weighs a lot, more than it should, surely".

— The worst is that he doesn't know how to get rid of all this intimate pain. He has a happy life with Dolors and Joan, the son they share, is a university professor and has the ambition to write autofiction. He acts like a hedonist, but inside he is torn apart.

He has dedicated his thesis to the mysterious "man in the iron mask", who was literary adapted by J.W. Goethe and Alexandre Dumas, among others. Does he also wear a mask?

— As we grow older, we put on masks and forget the child we were. Isaac wants to create autofiction from his own life: he needs to put on another mask. This happens to him because he is an emotional inept. He is incapable of taking the bull by the horns.

Why do their wounds start in early childhood?

— One of the biggest challenges of this novel was to put myself in the mind of a 60-year-old man.

Are men more emotionally inept than women, in general?

— Women tend to analyze everything when we meet and chat among ourselves. Conversations between men tend to be more superficial and anecdotal. Perhaps it's due to a lack of habit of going deeper, or perhaps they don't need to.

It would have gone well for Isaac. The day he starts his last year of work vacation, while lying in one of the garden hammocks, a pineapple falls on his head, leaving him in a coma.

— The starting point of the novel was precisely this. One day I was at home, about to read under a pine tree, when a pinecone fell very close to me. I thought that if it had fallen on my head, it could have really hurt me. At that moment I had a story written about a child who remembered how his grandfather used to pick him up from school. The man is going blind and the child, in order to explain everything he sees to him, begins to study the entire dictionary to have the right words.

In the novel, this grandfather who goes to look for Isaac dies when the child is still going through the letter 'ef'.

— Yes, he stumbles on the stairs before going to look for him...

The angel looking at me is structured from the memories that Isaac relives while he is in a coma.

— This was the third, and decisive, element that made me write the novel. I wanted to write a book about the unconscious of someone who drags many ghosts from the past. What do we do with these ghosts? Do we dare to look them in the face, or do we keep a distance?

Isaac is fortunate to share his life with a woman he loves, Dolors.

— Despite love, people don't change. Isaac falls in love three times: first, with Brigitte, during the years he spends in Berlin, then with Roser, with whom he has two children – but they never quite understand each other –, and finally with Dolors. She shakes him up, even though he continues to drag the same ghosts.

The intellectual life that Isaac leads also doesn't allow him to overcome the discomfort, right?

— It's just another mask. Guillem Terribas [a bookseller on Girona's 22 for years] said at a presentation of The Angel Looking at Me that it is a novel against intellectualism.

Do you agree?

— We have to learn to give more importance to feelings and to dare to live things.

Even so, you are a teacher and writer, you read a lot and you are also a film buff...

— I play at pretending to be intellectual, but my great struggle is to keep the inner child alive. I always repeat to my children: "Never stop being silly".

And what do they tell you?

— They have a very good example at home to follow. It's me.