To novelize the history of Mallorca

The novels of Antoni Vidal Ferrando (Santanyí, Mallorca, 1945) are a great textual reservoir of community memory, the long and tangled history of an 'us' made from an endless swarming of concrete 'I's, 'you's, and 'they's, a narrative pot where men and women of all kinds and conditions boil, and where everything from tragic and bloody deeds to picturesque and almost comic events are explained, a pot where ancestral knowledge and ignorance coexist with an endless string of rumors, evocations, memories, curiosities, adventures, facets, dramas, chimeras, murmurs, slander, and phantasmagoria. Vidal Ferrando's is, let's put it this way, a populous literature –more: multitudinous–, to the point that the reader feels saturated by the avalanche of names and characters that parade before their eyes. All of this could be a bit indigestible and disconcerting, were it not for the fact that Vidal Ferrando's prose, with a preciousness that never feels exhibitionist or vain, turns it into multicolored, intense, and vivid literature.

The Gardener's Hand, which was published in 1999 by Edicions 62 after receiving the Sant Joan Narrative Prize and which Nova Editorial Moll has now recovered in a version revised by the author and headed by a brief prologue by editor Tomeu Canyelles, is a paradigmatic example of the literature of the writer from Santanyí. While the raw material with which the novel is made is the history of rural Mallorca in the first half of the 20th century, with the events of the Civil War as the central tragic core and with the struggle between the Falangists and the members of Catholic Action as one of the dramatic and plot pivots of the whole, here there is no documented and recovered history, but rather history meticulously assimilated and laboriously transformed through the tricks, techniques, and ambition of literature. It does not seem exaggerated to me to state that this novel by Vidal Ferrando, like other titles of his such as The Moon and the Toads, is a kind of intermediate link between the novels of Baltasar Porcel (history, myth, epic, atavisms) and the novels of Jesús Moncada (history, irony, tragicomedy, gossip).

Although The Gardener's Hand has a specific and defined narrator, about whom we learn information in dribs and drabs as the story unfolds and grows, the novel's main protagonist is the human community of the Mallorcan town of Santanyí, which is represented by a very rich gallery of characters (always between realistic precision and a grand guignol and slightly hyperbolic expressiveness: vicars, smugglers, teachers, sailors, young ladies from good families, farmers, soldiers...), a gallery that includes all human psychologies and all social strata. Vidal Ferrando's audacity is that he makes all these characters coexist within the democratic chaos of a novelistic universe where political-economic hierarchies and social roles are perfectly established and play a determining role, but are annulled by the superior and freer laws of literary creation.

From a formal point of view, the most striking virtue of La mà del jardiner is that it combines the narrative agility of short stories with a prose of a most natural opulence, that is to say, highly crafted.