Janer Manila, Vicens, Vidal Ferrando, Llompart

The literary resumption (the rentrée(if you prefer the Gallicism) has brought new books by Gabriel Janer Manila, Antonia Vicens, and Antoni Vidal Ferrando to the bookstores. The three have in common that they are members of the same generation and that they are from Mallorca, but above all, they are three great authors of contemporary Catalan literature.

These new books corroborate this. Take up your cross (Labreu), by Antonia Vicens, is –as the evangelical resonance of the title suggests– an impressive meditation on death, one's own and that of others, which in fact Vicens already develops in her first book of poems, Lovely, an elegy on the death of his father. In Between two dark ones (a title that describes how we all live: between the darkness before birth and that after death), published by Proa, Antoni Vidal Ferrando delivers an impressive blow on the table before our decaying world, a time of criminals and cynics in which all hope seems to have been effectively abandoned. For his part, Gabriel Janer Manila narrates, in the novel Gallery of Solitudes (Nueva Editorial Moll), another decadent story: that of an old butifarra from Palma who lives alone in a mansion inhabited by the ghosts of his female relatives, after his wife left him because she had become the lover of the diocesan bishop. What the novelist truly portrays is contemporary Mallorcan society, a devastated moral landscape: Russian oligarchs, drug traffickers, unscrupulous hoteliers, corrupt and ignorant politicians, and a long list of other forms of infamy, with the same mischievous and clairvoyant tone as the maid Dovima. Janer Manila has hinted that this could be his last work of fiction, and all things considered, focusing on the dead and the one who watches over them is an excellent way to bring down the curtain.

As if all this were not enough, it has also just been published As long as I have a shred of breath left, the biography that scholar and doctor in philology Pilar Arnau i Segarra has written about Josep M. Llompart, one of the most important poets of the generation of the 1950s and also a staunch activist for the Catalan language, culture, and nation during the Franco regime and beyond, whose centenary is commemorated this year. Pilar Arnau has carried out a meticulous and passionate work, resulting in a book that will henceforth constitute a milestone, an indispensable reference for understanding Llompart, his work, and his time.

Each of these books deserves extensive and in-depth reading and commentary, and clearly the purpose of this article is simply to provide the news and strongly encourage you to read them. This article also addresses the ugly and increasingly widespread vice of viewing Catalan literature by autonomous community. That's what you just did here, someone might say. No, I'm going to insist. What I've tried to do is dedicate an article to four books, and above all, to four authors, who are at the forefront of contemporary Catalan literature.