Jordi Masó: "The idea of a foster parent system was given to me by a friend's mother"

BarcelonaJordi Masó (Granollers, 1967) combines his work as a professor at the Catalonia Higher Music School and the Granollers Conservatory with that of a writer. Without being as prolific as in his role as a pianist —he has recorded more than sixty albums—, he has published up to seven collections of short stories and, at Males Herbes publishing house, the novels L’hivern a Corfú (2020) and Xacona (2023), with which he won the Llibreter Prize. He now adds to his bibliography a new collection of short stories, also at Males Herbes, titled Jo això ja no ho veuré. It brings together nine stories with unconventional writing techniques (two of them written in the manner of dramatis personae and acknowledgements, so that the reader can get an idea). What unites them is the theme: they are set in oppressive or catastrophic near futures. The author himself confesses that the alternative title for the volume was Artefactes distòpics.

How do you combine being a pianist and a writer?

— Well, you're doing it. I've gotten used to having regular activity as a pianist, which demands a few hours every day. It's like someone who does gymnastics, to stay a little in shape. And then, when I have something to write, I write it. I can go a few days or a week without writing and nothing happens. The piano, on the other hand, I can't stop. But, hey, it's very pleasant to do the two things you like.

And what about genre literature that you are interested in?

— I have followed him since I was young. Since I really like doing parodies, these rigid schemes, with typical characters, offer a lot of room to find a way to twist them. The typical inspector or the typical alien are very entertaining.

In fact, in I will not see this anymore there are two stories that approach the detective genre, The DZO file and Filigree.

— Yes, and also in science fiction. When writing this book, I was motivated by the fact that as a teenager I read a lot of science fiction. And when I wrote stories, I always wrote them in that genre. Afterwards, I abandoned it quite a bit and now I read little science fiction. From time to time some author interests me, but I'm not a fan of the genre. The book is a return to that literature that captivated me when I was young.

You already published two short stories. Dramatis personae appeared in the magazine Freakcions and tells about a market for human organs capable of regenerating them. And whorehouse.com appeared in My First Porn Book (Males Herbes, 2024) and collects reviews of cyborg brothels.

— I had these two stories and I said “why not make a book with these two conditions? Dystopian futures and formal experimentation”. I wanted to write stories that were dystopias, visions of the future, and that did not follow the traditional system of a narrative story, but rather had a very different appearance. It's nothing new, many people have done it, but my challenge was this.

What is your idea of a dystopia?

— A happy world, 1984, Us… Stories that propose a future where society has been put together in a certain way and the challenge for the writer is to make it believable and to see above all the pros and cons. The conflict that this society you invent will create. It seemed to me that it could provide material for a book. Since I am lucky enough to have loyal editors, I can afford to think about books. When I didn't have an editor, I only thought about stories one by one.

The first story, Dramatis personae, about humans capable of regenerating organs, makes for a novel and a Hollywood film.

— Or the second, Dossier DZO, in which a kind of police force is dedicated to retiring those who refuse to be cremated at 65 years of age. Anyway, I might get bored. Besides, I've just finished Xacona, which also had a somewhat innovative format and was a story that kept repeating itself. It was a year and a half of focusing only on that and thinking about a story and its possible variations. Here the advantage is that a story is finished in a few months and then you move on to something completely different.

Pere Calders and Manuel de Pedrolo, in Trajecte final, also have stories about totalitarian states that grant a predetermined death date.

— I have read everything by Calders since I was 13 years old. When he was alive, I used to buy and read whatever he published. And Pedrolo's Trajecte final is fantastic. It was one of the things I imitated when I was 14 or 15 years old. I think it's the best he wrote. The Mecanoscrit is not a book I like. Survival bores me a lot. Post-apocalyptic stories don't interest me much. And yet I've made one [the story "Noranta-nou visions de l’apocalipsi"] from the collection. But mine is apocalyptic, not post-apocalyptic. 

Dossier DZO also remembers a lot of Blade Runner.

— Philip K. Dick was one of my passions. The downside is that he wrote too much. He wasn't a polished writer, he was a writer of extraordinary imagination. He wrote a book every three or four months and it's impossible to put effort into it like that. The films that have been made are very interesting, but I'm not interested in prose as functional as his. He's not the type of writer I'm looking for, but I devoured his novels like churros when I was 16 or 17 years old.

The story A Grandfather at Home, about a system of adopting grandparents, is written as a documentary script. The title does not appear until the third page.

— It's a copy of the documentaries. Sometimes they start with some statements and then the title appears. With this story, the editors suffered with how the paragraphs looked, because there was a double column. I thought it was great to write a documentary. I copied it directly from Ted Chiang, who has a story like that. I understand it's the story he likes the least, but curiously it's the one I like the most.

In the text, you maintain the features of orality of speech.

— Yes. I tried to make it not grammatically correct, but so that each person's way of speaking was believable, with their tics. It was something quite worked on and it was very fun to do. Normally, I work paying attention to every sentence, that it is melodious and does not repeat words. Here, on the other hand, the point was to do the opposite: that the language did not sound good, that it sounded like people speak.

Where did the idea for a notification adoption system come from?

— My friend's mother gave it to me, who had told her daughter: “Let's see if someone adopts me someday!”. And I said, “holy crap, there's something here”.