Vicenç Villatoro: "My wife's death was a central punctuation mark in my life."

BarcelonaOver the past decade, Vicente Villatoro (Terrassa, 1957) has expressed his creativity like never before in his career. In addition to publishing an ambitious narrative trio on identity – which concluded with The grandparents' house (Proa, 2021)–, has written essays such as Too Much Fire: Extremely Apocryphal Dialogues between Savonarola and Machiavelli (Pórtico, 2018) and has made known Sant Llorenç del Munt: a biography (Symbol, 2025), a personal and collective journey through the massif located between the Vallès Occidental and Bages regions.

This fall he published the novel Polish (Proa, 2025), starring a Mossad spy – or perhaps a double agent – and set in Warsaw in 1991, shortly after the collapse of the USSR. "It suits me, both literarily and spiritually, to talk about literature, because the book could lead us to discuss complicated issues, about which I have a very formed opinion, but which cannot be resolved in a sentence and a half," warns the author in relation to the complex current situation in Israel and Gaza just before beginning the interview.

When I reached the end of this novel and saw that he began writing it 14 years ago, I thought about Moon River (Columna, 2011), motivated by the death of his wife, Montserrat Oliver. It's no coincidence that grief plays a prominent role in both books.

— It is, yes, explained in both cases through the eyes of a character. In the case of Polish, of the protagonist.

It appeared at the same time as the diary Via Toscana (Stonberg, 2025), where she also appears.

— We made that trip in 2008, two years before she died. I wrote it in parallel with the events.

It must have been one of the toughest periods he's ever been through.

— Yes. The death of my wife was a central punctuation mark in my life. It's one of those moments that marked a before and after.

Perhaps that is why it still resonates in a book like this. Polish, No?

— I designed Polish in 2011, and so the engine of the novel started then, but it was reconfigured as I wrote it. Initially, I conceived it as a novel about identity linked to more political or more public experiences of the time, as well as from debates with friends. It was later that the theme of mourning became important. At first, I even thought of a story similar to Enric Marco's, in which a man, upon being liberated from the camps, takes a prisoner's ID and adopts his identity. This idea of identity change also appears in a little-read novel of mine, Between battles [Pórtico, 1987]. In many of my books, moreover, the characters have two names: it becomes Grey Gospel [Editions 62, 1981], in The city of smoke [Editions 62, 2001]...

In PolishIn The Dark Knight: The protagonist has not two but three names. The same man is a German businessman named Klaus Steinberg, a Mossad spy named Saul Shalev, and an ally of the Russian KGB, Andrzej Zelig. What has made this character stay with you for so long? It's been, intermittently, for almost fifteen years.

— Polish It's one of the novels I've written in which the plot is most relevant. There were times when I didn't know how to continue and I stopped. If I managed to unblock it, it wasn't thanks to current events.

How was it then?

— Years ago, I had a conversation with Jorge Luis Borges that was very important to me. He told me that when I wrote a story, I knew how it would begin, that I had a rough idea of how it would end, and that I also knew, more or less, what would happen in between—that is, how it would lead from one thing to another. Borges told me that only at the end did I think about where and when the action took place. I strongly identify with this way of working. For me, the driving force of a narrative is why I'm writing it and what I want to explain. Second comes the plot. The last thing I decide is the setting, that is, the place and time of the action. I have the feeling that, increasingly, narratives are placing their main driving force in setting: there are writers who want to explain their generation, others who reconstruct what life was like in Barcelona in the 1950s...

It's no coincidence that I began working on the novel at the height of the Trial, isn't it? The first major demonstration was on September 11, 2012.

— In 2010, the Process was already chugging along, and conversations with friends began. I remember hearing in one of these conversations: "In what we're going to do, identity isn't the most important thing, but shared interests." Identity began to be seen as an insult. As something essentialist. But identities are also chosen. While I was writing A man who leaves [Proa, 2014], my father and I went to the town where he grew up, Castro del Río [in Córdoba], and we settled for a few days with the relatives who still lived there—my aunt, my cousins—in an apartment they rented for us. One day we went to a funeral, and my father, who had always spoken to me in Catalan, said, "They do things differently here than we do." My father had left Castro del Río when he was 20, but the "we" he had chosen was the one he shared with me. I wanted to write. Polish to explore identity, as well as the memory that doesn't fit into history. If it had been set in Catalonia, it would have read like just another novel about the Civil War.

The journey you propose is to Poland in the early 1990s. And the setting is a spy story. Is it a tribute to a genre that was very popular when you started writing?

— If you use genres or codes shared with the reader, you achieve many things. In a Western, you don't need to have been there before to know that in the village there's a parlor with two doors that open a certain way. I haven't spent a day in a stately home in Great Britain, but I know I'd find a butler with a very specific look. The same thing happens with spy novels.

The protagonist says, in a dialogue: "Spying is lying." And the other responds: "Spying is obtaining the truth. Lying is the instrument." What interested you about spies?

— Pretense is almost like splitting. The spy must truly be all the characters. It's not enough to make them visible; he must embody them. Think of those police officers infiltrated by the CUP in Girona who end up involved with party militants and, in some cases, have a child. When the police officer is in bed with the CUP girl, is he still an agent? The second life of an infiltrator can't be absolutely cynical.

The protagonist, who has lost his wife, soon realizes that she may have been spying on him.

— If at first the theme of the book is identity – we are what we are, or we are what others think we are –, in the love subplot a novel by Amos Oz had importance, which in Hebrew had the title Meet a woman, and which Siruela published in Spanish as Joel's womenThe question then becomes another: do we ever get to know anyone, even those closest to us? In my novel, what ultimately matters isn't whether she's spying on him or not, but whether she misses him. "I wish she were here," the protagonist admits.

The character of Polish He says: "I don't know who I am. I don't know who I want to be. Those I thought were with me, from near and far, around the world and at home, are not here or have failed me." Where are we Catalans now, now that the Process is over?

— Something that has happened globally in recent years—not just in Catalonia—is that the sense of belonging, the construction of "we," has been strengthened. We've realized that the sense of belonging is also one of the driving forces of history, in addition to the class struggle. Furthermore, it seems to me to be a source of hope that identities are not immutable, but that there is a component of identity that can be chosen.