Carles Fenollosa: "Why do Valencians not have a mythical memory?"

BarcelonaCarles Fenollosa (València, 1989) has been one of the literary surprises of the season. After debuting with Narcís o l'onanisme (Premi Lletraferit 2018) and writing several essays, the latest of which was La modernitat frustrada (Premi València, 2025), he published his second novel a few months ago, Guerra, victòria, demà (Drassana, 2025), one of the best of 2025 according to and a finalist for the Premi Òmnium.The book's action takes place during the Valencia of the Republic, the Civil War, and exile, following the life of Jesús Martorell, a committed doctor, to Paris, Naples, Dachau, and Buenos Aires.Your first novel, Narcís o l’onanisme

, already dealt with historical memory, but was set in the present. Now you travel to the past with Jesús Martorell.

— The first is another novel of rabid youth, centered on the present and a solitary character. And Jesús Martorell's is a look at the past from the present. All the rage and irony that was in the first novel is now another story of sad satire. 

The title War, victory, tomorrow you take it from the homonymous poetry book from 1938 by Miquel Duran i Tortajada.

— Firstly, the title helps to dialogue with memory in the sense of the three parts of the novel: it helps to have a vision of the war, a vision of the victory, and a vision of tomorrow. With this, I have structured the decades that the novel covers, which in the end is a good part of the 20th century. Secondly, it is a tribute to an author who died in the most public indifference in 1947, after being a very involved person in the hopeful times of the Second Republic.

You said the novel has taken many years.

— Yes, because it is a novel that, to respect the era it deals with, had to have meticulous documentation, otherwise, it's an insult. And then it has had many rewriting phases to find the character's voice, which has been the most complicated thing of all.

The cover shows a photograph of Valencia in 1944, with the Pellissers square having just been demolished. In a tweet you said: “It could have been another year, but not another city or another area”. Why?

— The novel has three lines of reading and they all pass through Pellissers square. The first is purely plot-driven, the story that is told, and Pellissers square is its core. The second is the mythical, of making contact with literary tradition and what has been written before: the return home, frustrated or not, etcetera. And the square also has a central position in this. And the third line is the historical one, of what has happened in this part of the world, called Valencia, throughout the 20th century. Therefore, as an already disappeared square and the nerve center of Valencian laborism, it was inevitable that it would appear on the cover.

Another important scenario, related to the square, is the Merlo Café.

— “Merlo” is a name that appears in the memoirs of Vicent Marco Miranda, who was the deputy of Esquerra Valenciana in Congress and lived for a time in that neighborhood, but the cafe does not exist as such. It is an invention that refers to those popular cafes that existed at the beginning of the century and that lasted for many decades as a meeting place, an agora. It helps to bring the square to life, because it functions as the point of human connection. In Pellissers there were many more: a coal shop, a hairdresser, for a time there was the Modern School of Ferrer i Guàrdia… But of course, without a cafe there was no life.

In the novel, you mix historical and fictional characters. For example, Puig i Ferreter gives Camins de França to Jesús Martorell in 1937.

— The fact that real characters appear gives credibility to the novel from a historical point of view. It is important because the fictional part of the novel is also based on very meticulous documentation. Therefore, on the one hand, it is a matter of solidity, that it be a solid and credible novel, and, on the other, it is a matter of a certain tribute to personalities who worked for our culture, language and literature in a specific period.

Jesús Peris Llorca in Caràcters and Ponç Puigdevall in El País have dedicated laudatory reviews to him. The former values the portrait of Valencia. The latter says that, beyond the historical setting, the important thing is the reflection on death "as an act of decency". Which interpretation do you prefer?

— I like this, that each reader makes one or another. There are readers who know the city of Valencia very well and are patriots. Peris Llorca has known pre-war Valencianism very well and, therefore, this part excites him. And there are readers who are very struck by the history of my character and who prefer the more purely novelistic part. And then there are others, like Ponç Puigdevall, who go more for the mythical or symbolic part: the odyssey of the impossible return home, the dialogue with death, the ironic vision of reality from a sadness that sometimes makes you smile... I agree with all of them.

A very notable aspect of literary style is the use of capital letters in some words.

— Yes. The other aspect of this sad irony or satire is the protagonist's style, who creates a certain neolanguage in which he speaks by himself. These capital letters mark certain words, certain terms, that the character is unable to digest. He is a repressed character, who is afraid of emotions, and uses these marks to be able to express himself. There are other authors who have used it and whom I like a lot. Witold Gombrowicz is a Polish author who arrives in Buenos Aires in August '39, shortly before Germany invaded Poland, and does not return. He has a novel called Transatlantic, in which he makes much more massive use of this. It is another type of novel, denser, about his wanderings in post-war Buenos Aires. I liked how he used it and I tried to adapt it to a character like Jesús Martorell. I think it worked in the end. Many told me “remove them”, but I think the character is better understood with this neolanguage.

There is the idea of Barcelona or Paris as great settings for historical novels of the 20th century, but Valencia not.

— My intention was to make Valencia precisely a symbol-city of the 20th century like the others you mentioned. It has been the idea from the beginning, and that's why it has spanned practically the entire century; not only is the pre-war and the war discussed, but a large part of the novel is the post-war and exile, and in fact it extends up to the year 1969. Why don't Valencians have a mythical memory? What a shit complex we have, don't we? In the end, it's about aspiring to be universal without giving up who you are, because otherwise you disappear. If in old East Prussia excellent novels are written, like Todo en vano [Walter Kempowski, 2006], why don't we follow the example?