The concern for what can (still) be said is at the heart of this beautiful book, winner of the latest edition of the Carles Riba prize –the first held on a new date–. Let's look at the poem that opens the proceedings, Picking Cherries. The pretext, like most of the pretexts in the poetry of Jaume Coll Mariné (how welcome that is!), comes from country life, from a family coexistence with nature: in this case, a ladder propped against the trunk of a cherry tree, which has remained there after the harvest, done months before. That ladder, which at an inopportune time no longer serves any purpose, “I wish it would mean something.” Perhaps like poetry. Further on, we find a poem of a more ideological nature –which, in the final notes, the author acknowledges as “an attempt to read some of the ways of doing of [Pere] Gimferrer.” It repeats the verse five times: “We no longer know what to call it.” And it is done to insist on all that is falling apart for us: “Nothing is more rotten today / than walking with the name of Spain”; and, a few verses later: “All of Catalonia is a shell / a cracked husk / Nothing is more rotten today.”

The new novel byEva Baltasar (Barcelona, ​​1978), FishIt contains powerful ideas, conveyed through consistently sharp, often pithy phrases. And there's one fundamental one, so illustrative it illustrates perfectly: "It's as if Victoria, instead of loving me, had infected me. As if love were a transmission and not a creation." I think this is the crux of the matter. FishThe love between the two protagonists is experienced by one of them—the narrator—as a transmission—infectious, not beneficial. There is, therefore, no shared creation, but rather domination and submission. The lover, besides being an enigma, is excessive in every way. In fact, physically, he is already gigantic when compared to the other. Outside of his hands: curiously, his are smaller.

Bernat and Bárbara, the two protagonists of this story, often ask themselves: what are we doing in this world? And they don't have the answer, although they have learned to live their lives turning their backs on the barbarity of our time, covering their ears amidst the unpleasant and deafening noise of the world, blindfolding themselves to the pervasive ugliness of so many things (and so many souls, to put it bluntly, especially if you don't stray far from the lands bathed by the Mediterranean (the "tired landscape," as they call it). They recently retired, and they have known each other since they were seventeen. In other words, they have spent their whole lives together, and, as they have grown older, they have increasingly embraced that way of life described by the philosopher Josep Maria Esquirol. defined it as intimate resistanceThe resilient couple barely use screens. Decades ago, they found their paradise on Earth in a little-known—and uncrowded—department in neighboring France, in the heart of Occitanie: Corrèsa. Since then, they have returned several times, because they both love excursions with profound repercussions and, conversely, detest trips designed for thrills. Now retired, they have tried to live, because they feel "withdrawal is the only way out." However, the project will not quite come to fruition.

Rosa Font Massot He hasn't been far off the mark, and has set out to write about desire. About sexual desire, urgent and vital, but also about the spiritual desire for creation, the desire to sing. And, furthermore, about the desire to forget our dying condition, to change our perspective, to contemplate ourselves from the outside, or from very high above, as suggested by the verses of Iorgos Seferis that head the last canto of this poem: "Under the sky, we are the fish and the trees." About the desire to understand life from its origin, without the mediation—and the extreme, intimate complication—of consciousness. It is, for all these reasons, an ambitious book: "The Poem of Desire "It aims to be the construction of a literary space where amorous desire is a fusion with the world and with all that we perceive and are."

This tetralogy was, for Thomas MannThe project of his life. It occupied him throughout his later years, because he began writing the book in 1926 and did not finish it until 1943. He had published only two years before the initial deadline. The Magic Mountain, and four after the final, Doctor FaustusMore than 120 years earlier, Goethe had also been fascinated by the biblical story of Joseph and had wanted to give it his own interpretation, but he was unsuccessful. This became an inspiration for Mann, who did complete his work (he considered it a "divine picaresque novel"). Today we are fortunate to be able to read the first two books of the tetralogy, in a very thorough translation by Ramon Monton. Let me also applaud his edition: free of typos and sloppy work, something unfortunately rare in Catalan publishing.

A complete and invaluable collection of lyrical works by a major voice in Catalan literary expression of the last fifty years; an author who had published with Tres i Quatre and Llibres del Mall, prestigious publishing houses that have done immense work in disseminating poetry... Gaspar Jaén Urban (Elche, 1952) presents his lyrical corpus since 1975. We should see him everywhere, giving excellent interviews; literary critics could seize the opportunity to review his work and discuss it extensively; bookstores should be vying to stock this volume... Will any of this happen? I'd bet my left hand it won't. It doesn't matter, but: Guadalajara has loved us!

If we asked ChatGPT, with the vast amount of information it has about the writer Jordi Lara (Vic, 1968), to write us a story imitating his style, his imaginative soul, I highly doubt that it would give us a product as unique, and at the same time as complete, as this one. The Cat and the Stars It seems to mark a new turning point in the career of the author ofA machine for waking up birds at night (2008) and Mystic rabbit (2016). There is no celebration of memory like the one we found in the books cited, for example. Nor is there a reconstruction of a real person through their last days of life, as occurred in Six nights in August (2019) with Lluís Maria Xirinacs. Here it seems rather that the author wanted to make a vehement defense of fiction per seThe beginning might remind us of those desert-like, civilization-overwhelming settings found in some American authors like Cormac McCarthy. A tradition that also goes back to Faulkner.

Gathering bits of clay scattered across barren land, the narrator of this highly recommended booklet states: "They remind me that the essence of narrative is emptiness. They don't explain how the vineyards were lost, but they reveal the existence of a village that is no more." The author has no ambition to reconstruct, from the collected fragments, the whole dish, the whole jug. In fact, equipped with a notebook in which he jots down ideas, intuitions, and quotes from others, he follows traces that are more or less erased. He travels to Lleida, returns to Barcelona, ​​goes as far as the Anoia basin, and finally arrives in his native Bages. In the notebook, he records everything that has overwhelmed civilization, the destructive work of a predatory neoliberalism. His journey is about place, of course, but also about time. Perhaps even more so about time. In the last hundred years, for example, the place—the country—has changed substantially: Catalonia's landscape has become predominantly urban. Concrete has overwhelmingly won out over the land. Before, when we went to a farmhouse to have a calçotada with friends, we said we were going to farmerThis expression has not only lost its punch, but the spirit it intends to convey is threatened.

One of the best-known poems of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is the one titled Digging (Digging), the first canonical piece in his songbook. The son of generations of Irish peasants, young Seamus must have been the first to break with the family's farming tradition. "Between my index finger and thumb / rests the stubby quill," this poem begins. And it ends in the same way, but with the addition of a final line: "I'll use it for digging." It's not an original theme for Heaney: without straying from his own tradition, we could recall the illustrious poet and mud-dugman Verdaguer (who, in fact, was a poet by vocation and only, if anything, a mud-dugman by family origin). Or, even more so, that prodigy by Guerau de Liost entitled Obaga de pechoswhose last verses I hesitate to reproduce, because they convey an emotion very close to that of the Irish Nobel laureate of 1995: "The shade grows little by little, overcoming / the dangers of dryness and fleas. / My father used to say, his lips now confiding, / 'Grandfather planted the shade / and you will cut it down.' / And I say: 'Oh, the! / What will be my endeavor?'

The phrase dark hour It appears several times in these two books (a novel and a collection of poems) by Quim Español (Girona, 1945). It does so on a double temporal axis: as an expression of the time of day when the sun is about to completely bury itself and, more importantly, as a metaphor for the entry into darkness of human existence. In the lyrical version, darkness is imprinted in the title itself.

I discovered Joan Pons almost 35 years ago, with his narrative debut: the meeting of stories Don't believe what they say about me(Columna, 1991). I found it to be a more than promising literary baptism of fire. Since then, I've continued to follow him and have often commented on his work in the media: The Giraffe Maze(Proa, 1999), Single men(Proa, 2001), The Ice House(Bromera, 2009) or Heart disease(Univers, 2022) are some of his most outstanding books, vigorous novels. Pons excels in what could be called moral adventure novelHis stories always appeal to readers, but the underlying theme tends to probe, if not even accuse, us. As if he were the nephew of Baltasar Porcel or Jesús Moncada. He has experience, things to say. That's why I've never been able to explain why he enjoys so little attention. Why he is, in the country's literary scene, an almost invisible author. In 2016, he debuted as a poet with a commendable book: The Island of the Defeated Trees (AdiA). His titles are scattered across many publishing houses, too many. How is it that no publisher has seriously invested in him?

I have allowed myself to use the title of the news by Honoré de Balzac to head my article on the Romanian Jew Max Blecher (1909-1938) because, as I read him –admired–, I was overcome by the impression of finding myself before a masterpiece by an author –I need to admit– of whom, until recently, I had not. How do you explain Mr. Sam Abrams In the prologue, this one from 1936 is the first title of a trilogy that they completed Scarred hearts (1937) and Enlightened Falls. Sanatorium Diary, a work that the author finished before his death, but which was not published until 1971. Literature lovers should not miss this gem!

On the tombstone that remembers the writer Cesare PaveseIn the cemetery of Santo Stefano Belbo, his hometown, one of the last phrases of The craft of living –the diary in which, among many other matters, he ends up announcing the gesture final (that of his suicide): "I have given poetry to men." He gave it to them in verse and prosaic form, and made the effort – successful – to understand the human soul, even though he drowned in his own.

"It will be a decent novel, which is the saddest thing a novel can be," thinks one of the three protagonists of this story. I don't think this is the saddest thing that can be said about a novel, considering that we can dedicate the most insulting comments to it. But I understand what the narrator wants to express: by summing up the spirit of a book with the adjective correct We are sparing his life (in reality, we are concluding that this is a dispensable work). Many pages earlier, that same character, Miquel Rovira, awaits the trial of his rival, Ramón Balaguer (Ramón with an accent, a Catalan writer with a Castilian expression), about his latest novel, still unpublished.

One of the 160 stories collected in these two essential volumes, which collect all of the short works of Hans Christian Andersen —an author who also practiced other genres, but who became famous for his stories—, is titled Pen and inkwell. Says the inkwell, boasting of its potential for creativity: "It's strange, all that can come from me! Yes, it's almost unbelievable! And I myself, truly, don't know what will happen next time, when that person begins to pour the ink on me." An inkwell, indeed, contains all the laws of literary possibilities, and all that is needed is for the writer to put the pen to it and develop his genius on the sheet of paper.

The title I have given to this article includes the phrase "time ago", which was the title of Ramon Solsona's magnificent novel published in 2022 –for me, one of the most consistent Catalan novels of recent decades. A series of unfortunate circumstances meant that this prodigious work didn't receive the recognition it deserved.

The poem—because it is a single poem in four cantos: unitary, narrative, of philosophical ambition—begins with the memory of an old family clock, tall and bulky, which for many years had been repudiated by everyone because of the noise of its mechanism: "And I fear that it reminds you of when you are a tree." In the second canto, the poet—or, strictly speaking, the "I" of the poem—evokes that on such a day as the one described, February 28, 2024, his mother would have turned 107. And these two elements—the old baluerno of the clock and the birth of the mother—promote a serious and sustained reflection on the mystery of time and memory. We must add the constant, tutelary presence—which we already find in the wink of the title—of the Four quartets of T.S. Eliot, a work that also meditates deeply on our dying nature and the irredeemable condition of time.

What a beautiful book, with echoes of classical myth and biblical parable! And what profound simplicity throughout! Just three characters (two siblings living alone and a newcomer to their home), always in the same place (a place with broad horizons, next to a lake, with forests nearby). Hege, the sister, will soon be forty and is already starting to count gray hairs. She knits: she makes sweaters, which she then sells. Her brother, Mattis, known to everyone as the Talos Because he's a different boy, three years younger than Hege, and has no job or subsidy. Of course, his questions often reveal the deepest cracks in his sister's conservative mentality. They think he's a complete fool, but, without realizing it, he possesses a kind of almost prophetic, disconcerting wisdom. Near where they live, there are two twin trees, two tremors: Mattis has always believed they represented the two siblings.

The title is the threshold of a book. And there are thresholds that seem to invite us to enter the work that they head and others that, on the contrary, rather dissuade us. As for the title of Maria Josep Escrivà's new book, I immediately felt that it was inviting me to get to know her verses. Because of the apparent contradiction that this phrase hides: can there be joy in oblivion? Perhaps yes: that of the lover who, finally, feels how the image of the beloved that has so mortified him is disintegrating. Or —and she wrote sophisticated lyrical material— that derived from the unconsciousness of someone who suffers from an illness that darkens his memory.

In a book titled Ninety-nine novels. The best in English since 1939 (1984), Anthony Burgess defined this novel, first published in 1958, as "the synthesis between the traditional and the revolutionary." The structure of The bell It is traditional in style: well-prepared, it progresses in a straight chronological sense – everything happens over several days – without putting any obstacles in the way of the reader. It can even recall the plot outline of a Victorian novel, due to the rural setting, which seems inspired by a certain gothic realism, and the mixture of dramatic elements, of varied colouring, and comics, which are scarcer than the previous ones. What is revolutionary, rather, is the treatment of the characters, servants of moral themes that interested and occupied the author, also a renowned philosopher (and here I would like to take the opportunity to recommend the high-voltage conversation, recorded for the BBC in 1977, that Iris Murdoe had with the author). Philosophy & literature).