Albert Pijuan: "Why do Catalans have a love-hate relationship with driving in the middle lane?"

BarcelonaAlbert Pijuan She has turned 40 in top creative form: she has won the Crexells Prize with her latest novel, The Great Replacement (Ángulo, 2024); has co-written, with Victoria Szpunberg, one of the theatrical sensations of the season, The third escape, which premiered at the TNC, and is currently working on two other stage works, the adaptation of Permagel, ofEva Baltasarand a story set in a restaurant. This fall, she also just presented In the middle lane (The Second Periphery, 2025), a "unique, foundational, and radical piece of political-road essay," as can be read on the back cover of the volume, or also a funny and extreme textual proposal narrated by Felip Roda, a village eccentric who aspires to get Catalan drivers to reduce their speed for martyrological purposes.

I admit that you have managed to write a book that makes it difficult to ask questions.

— I'm sure it will be difficult for me to answer them.

The reader might think it's because you're addressing a sensitive topic, but that's not exactly the case.

— The whole thing is so stupid, and I'm so uninterested in it, this business of driving in the middle of the road, and cars in general...

But you've dedicated an entire book to it. Why?

— In Miguel AdamThe editor of La Segunda Periferia emailed me over a year ago with a proposal. He said he'd had a nagging feeling about driving in the middle lane of the highway for some time. It had even sparked a Twitter controversy, because he insisted that driving in the middle lane was the most prudent, and he faced a barrage of criticism. The Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) even got involved. Anyway, he emailed me to propose that I write a book about it. He thought I was the ideal person for the job. The more absurd the proposal, the more I'm intrigued. Three of the topics that generate the most opinions among Catalans are traffic, the weather, and cooking.

The previous year you had written an essay on capitalism entitled Why don't we rethink cannibalism? (Medusa, 2023). Here, under the pretext of the middle lane, you end up talking about Catalan society.

— I saw that the point of political analysis was clear and direct. Why do Catalans have such a love-hate relationship with driving in the middle lane? There's a very strong segment of society that believes it's the most sensible option, but at the same time, it stirs up anger among the more peaceful people, myself included. I'm one of those drivers who can go crazy if someone's blocking the middle lane. You see the right and left lanes are clear, and then someone's stuck in the middle... Violence rises inside me when I think about it.

After a dozen prologues, Felip Roda analyzes, in a pamphlet that is both victim-oriented and incendiary, the drama of being Catalan.

— I read a lot of Catalan nationalist and Catholic political theory by authors such as Josep Torras i Bages, Josep Ferrater i Mora, Jaume Vicens Vives... And, above all, that book that Jordi Pujol wrote while he was in prison, From the hills on the other side of the river. He has a very specific tone, a false modesty that can be seen for miles, a pious air, that very Catalan thing of being full of dignity, the desire to become a martyr, but with hidden interests.

Would you say that Felip Roda's twisted and victim-playing style imitates Pujol's?

— I don't know if it's a dialogue or a parody, but before I start writing In the middle lane I would read ten or fifteen pages of that book, and I ended up reworking many of those strange metaphors.

Like what?

— There's a moment when Roda says he'll be the captain of the lowest-ranking battalion. This comes from Pujol. Or that thing about him constantly repeating that, even though he's not a writer, he has the will to reach the country.

Felip Roda writes: "One of the aspects in which we need to improve as a people is the choice of our national emblems. On this point we have always been careless, unfortunate as well, clumsy even." Enric MarcoPau Claris, the first blood sausage. The genocidal Christopher Columbus. Víctor Amela, the stain of The Vanguard. Francisco Cambó, the great turncoat. "Or Neus Català".

— This Felip Roda is wearing the glasses of defeat, which are something like the glasses of the post-Process era. He has an absolutely negative view of the current situation. He believes we've been defeated, that there's no hope—a very Catalan state of mind. Parodying this attitude, you might think that we're actually still in the same place as always, that we're no worse off than before...

We have the growth – or strength, to use Felip Roda's vocabulary – of a party like Aliança Catalana.

— Given that the post-convergent movement is feeling its waning, the whole country must feel it; it's still a trend stemming from Pujolism. Part of the response to the defeatism following the Process can be found in the spirit of Aliança Catalana, which proposes a return to a simplistic and misunderstood essentialism. Many of the voices that appear in the book—because there's Felip Roda's, but also those of the authors of the prologue and the afterword—could be aligned with Aliança Catalana because of their anarcho-Carlinist tone, which is really just a kind of nationalistic, cronyistic approach.

Tell me about this "nationalist-brother-in-law" thing. I read the word on the back cover of the book, but I don't know what it means...

— Each of the voices is built on several commonplaces that we can associate with some public figures or people we know from our environment.

For example, there's a certain Martí Ginorell, a writer who worked as a traffic officer for a few years but wants us to forget this professional stage of his life.

— This is one such case. I associate each one with a series of prejudices and preconceptions, as well as linguistic mannerisms. The most difficult technical challenge of the book was to give each voice its own personality, and to achieve this, in most cases, in very few pages.

In the middle lane This is your ninth book of fiction, but you have written a lot of plays.

— Every author has a set of strengths and weaknesses and tries to cling to what they believe they master. I'd say I dedicate myself to theater because I have a knack for voices. Right now I'm adapting... Permagel I'm working with Victoria Szpunberg, and I'm also writing a play that takes place in a restaurant. With this last one, my hidden side is starting to emerge.

Because you said so?

— Because I worked as a waiter for thirteen years. In Barcelona, ​​in Calafell...

I heard somewhere that you worked as a waiter, but not for that many years. And also that you were a creative writing teacher. How do you make a living now?

— I combine my collaborations with Victoria Szpunberg with novel reviews, talks, book clubs, the occasional conference... And also with the DJ gigs I do most weekends.

I had no idea about that.

— I have a great time DJing. I mainly play around the region. Last week I played in Calafell on Halloween night. I do a bit of everything: beach bars, events, weddings, 40th birthday parties...

In the middle lane It has arrived precisely on your fortieth birthday. I get the impression that your books are becoming increasingly delirious; this is not necessarily a negative comment.

— One of the most negative reviews that came out when the Spanish translation of The Great Replacement In Sexto Piso, I said the novel was a mess because I had put so much effort into it. I ended by saying that, although I had great technical skill, what I needed to do was calm down.

Perhaps you don't calm down because the world around us is becoming progressively more absurd and unrestrained.

— It seems increasingly absurd to me, but if you ask someone in their twenties, they might tell you it all seems normal. We live in a constant state of delirium that seems impossible to overcome until the next day. My novels are delirious because they reflect a particular view of reality, which is my own, although perhaps it's also a generational phenomenon.

Are you referring to the omnipresence of social media, the obsessive relationship many people have with their mobile phones, and the multiple twists and turns of Catalan and global politics?

— There's a very individualistic neoliberal mantra that isolates us in a bubble, disconnecting us from others. All of this creates a kind of autistic or solipsistic individual, where each person is trapped in their own specific, absolute paranoia, right?

How do you personally break out of that bubble?

First, by writing from other voices. I try not to repeat my own, but to adopt others to understand different points of view. Although I lack social media, I have a very active social life. The group, the close-knit community, is incredibly important. I avoid neoliberal dogmas of efficiency as much as I can. This corporate discourse, filtered into the human world, lies at the root of that collective delusion in which everyone is trapped in a movie and finds it increasingly difficult to understand the movie that the person next to them is living.