The void to which speculation and real estate predation lead us

Gathering bits of clay scattered across barren land, the narrator of this highly recommended booklet states: "They remind me that the essence of narrative is emptiness. They don't explain how the vineyards were lost, but they reveal the existence of a village that is no more." The author has no ambition to reconstruct, from the collected fragments, the whole dish, the whole jug. In fact, equipped with a notebook in which he jots down ideas, intuitions, and quotes from others, he follows traces that are more or less erased. He travels to Lleida, returns to Barcelona, ​​goes as far as the Anoia basin, and finally arrives in his native Bages. In the notebook, he records everything that has overwhelmed civilization, the destructive work of a predatory neoliberalism. His journey is about place, of course, but also about time. Perhaps even more so about time. In the last hundred years, for example, the place—the country—has changed substantially: Catalonia's landscape has become predominantly urban. Concrete has overwhelmingly won out over the land. Before, when we went to a farmhouse to have a calçotada with friends, we said we were going to farmerThis expression has not only lost its punch, but the spirit it intends to convey is threatened.

The work begins by embarrassing a character in WG Sebald, sir Raymond Quilter (an idle man who pilots his small plane, and who is therefore above the world). In many 19th-century novels, characters usually arrived in a city by train: it was a gradual, not sudden, entry (those who, in later years, will arrive by plane will not be entirely capable of this, because landing in a place remains an abstraction). The narrator of this book feels the need to rise above it to contemplate the subject matter. The airports of Alguaire-Lleida and La Seu d'Urgell-Andorra are not only backdrops, but also scenes of desolation ("two airports and no city that truly serves them"). Some have grown rich, but with much unchecked speculation! Later, the narrator will introduce us to a gentleman from Machiavelli's century, an Italian traveler with whom he exchanges ideas. Earlier, however, he had described in beautiful passages the desertion of the countryside by the owners of the Palmerola palace in Barcelona's Portaferrissa district: the unforgettable members of the Lloberola lineage, transformed by Sagarra into high-caliber novelistic material: "The same history fatally linked the fate of the sheaves and the centers of economic activity with the imperial image that the classes that had been the wealthiest (and those that now occupy their place) had of themselves."

Vicenç Pagès Jordà and Toni Sala have extracted much narrative potential from non-places and suburban spaces, deserted or not, of formidable ugliness, that have grown up on the outskirts of our cities. Cesc Martínez, however, has done something different: he has constructed a narrative closer to the books of Mercedes IbarzA highly suggestive literary essay in which—I insist—emptiness is the defining characteristic of the narrative. The emptiness of a countryside being emptied (it's worth repeating: fascism also bears some responsibility), of cities that grow poorly. The emptiness to which we are being led by real estate speculation and plunder, the gold rush, the absolute lack of respect for the planet and commitment to humanity.