Two good books if you have plans to visit the forest or the coast this summer.
BarcelonaWith summer vacations approaching, it's time to decide: what do you fancy more, the sea or the mountains? This question sometimes becomes a question of identity: are you more of a water or dry land person? Whenever someone presents this combination, I think the experience of many Catalans is the middle way: neither sea nor mountain; some of us are forest and pool people. Others, plain and marsh people. In any case, the combination of soaking and shade is usually the goal of anyone who wants to overcome the hot season. Whatever you decide, I recommend a book about dry land and a book that has a certain aftertaste of salt water and that, while we're at it, reminds us of the absurdity of valuing our territory only when we have vacations.
For mountain readers
If it's mountain, a contemporary classic. Perejaume is my favorite artist when it comes to relating face to face with the earth; when it comes to being, as we are, earth. If you've ever loved a tree, you must have the book Pagesics (Ediciones 62, 2011) on their shelves. The care of the undergrowth, the dry-stone walls fragmenting each terrain, the paths guiding our steps or the quarries giving us material to survive; for many years, shaping the mountains did not seem an impossible dream. Our ancestors worked them, and the poems in this book serve to glimpse this tug-of-war between living beings.
What is clear is that humans have never managed to make nature their own. Forests surpass us in size, strength, and free will, and yet there are people who believe they can contain a grove within a small container. These people are the writers, and the container, the words. The struggle to house life within a set of words, and thus make writing meaningful, is also one of the main points of Pagesics: : it is not only a portrait of the consequences of the progressive human abandonment of fields and forests, or a vindication of the trades of the land, or a reflection on the concept of "agrarianity"; it is also a search for the reason for writing if not to correspond to the creative impulse of nature.
Perhaps you will understand me better if I simply reproduce some of Perejaume's words: "Whoever was capable of describing a tree, to the point that nothing remained in the tree and the tree came to life entirely in the description, so planted in the new substrate of voice as uprooted [to live, the trees perceive it. Because, as I am, I can make a tree into a work but I don't know how to make it realize that it is."
For sea readers
If it's from the sea, a new release. Another publication that deepens our relationship with the Catalan landscapes. Answered prose, by Miquel Martín y Serra (Periscopio, 2025). If you had to give a gift to a coastal lover, you've already got it, although this statement is somewhat misleading: the book refers to the Empordà region, and that doesn't always imply the sea. You'll find stories both at water level and inland because, in fact, each part is interwoven with the other.
The title describes the work perfectly: we are faced with a collection of rewritten prose by an author born in Begur who loves his land and needs it to explain his own existence. I would say that Miquel Martín's book is political in the sense that through literature he conveys a territorial, social, and linguistic position. It is a memoir, a portrait of landscapes, foods, speech, and customs that often draws on childhood memories and that praises the small things in life to find a greater meaning.
Considering the literary tradition that exists in the Empordà (the same author cites Pla, Gaziel, and others) and, above all, the pedantic image conveyed by vacationers of a fine house and boats in marked areas, it's hard not to have reservations about any sentimental description of the territory. Mainly because a good part of the ideal that is transmitted isn't even fair to the people who, from generation to generation, have had to adapt to the elements of the land in order to live (getting along with the sea has never been easy).
In this sense, Miquel Martín writes from the heart about what it means to inhabit that piece of the world, even though it's difficult not to end up creating an idyllic advertisement because the Empordà is, indeed, beautiful. The first text refers to the wind, its chaos and its beauty, to everything it gives and everything it takes, and it seems to me to be a story about the beauty of the landscape that puts you on the right foot in the collection. In fact, Martín doesn't make things last too long: the replies are brief, sometimes more literary, sometimes more opinionated (especially those referring to language, where he speaks critically of the loss of vocabulary). His determination to choose beautiful, precise words appropriate to the territory he portrays is evident, in order to fully capture the essence of the place, which he achieves with flying colors. So, if you're a person with a maritime culture, this summer's book is already available.
