Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​1965) is a novelist who possesses the virtues of audacity and a keen sense of timing. This, I believe, is undeniable, regardless of whether you like his novels or not. When I say he has the virtue of audacity, I mean that he conceives narrative projects that are grand in both ambition and capacity to surprise, and that he dares to attempt to execute them without resorting to specious precautions or reining in his imagination. And when I say he has the virtue of a keen sense of timing, I mean that he knows how to read the signs and interests of each historical moment and, with a threefold literary, political, and anthropological perspective, knows how to incorporate them into his novels. He demonstrated this with Victus and the commemoration of the tercentenary of the fall of Barcelona against the Bourbon troops in the War of the Spanish Succession. He demonstrated this with The monster of Saint Helena and the desire to reinterpret reality through the lens of feminist justice that sparked the Me Too movementAnd he proves it again now with After the shipwreck and the vengeful resentment and the miasma of disappointment and shame that the failure of the independence process has instilled in Catalan society.

"Sometimes people tell me I write books like they used to, and I think they're just like they always were," he said this afternoon. Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​1965) at the Museu Marítim, the chosen venue to present After the shipwreckThis is the first novel he has published with Univers – an imprint of Abacus Futur – after 25 years with La Campana. Despite changing literary trends and generational shifts, Sánchez Piñol remains faithful to the adventure novels that shaped him as a child and allowed him, thanks to Cold skin (La Campana, 2002), achieved unprecedented success in Catalan literature. If that novel, set on a remote island, had echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson, in Pandora in the Congo (The Bell, 2005) resonated within it Joseph Conrad, which has appeared in other books by the author. In After the shipwreckThe tribute is another great classic of the 19th century, Herman Melville

"My name is Ismael, Ismael Coficofin, and I think I survived only to tell you this story": that's how it begins After the shipwreck, the new novel byAlbert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​1965), in which he dares to continue one of the most ambitious and at the same time cursed books of the 19th century, Moby Dick, of Herman MelvilleThe commercial and critical failure when it was published in 1851 was resounding, although over time it came to be considered one of the great novels in the history of literature.

A few years before we entered the 21st century, the free market expanded throughout the world. We call this phenomenon globalization: a historical period in which countries became interconnected like never before, capitalism became the hegemonic economic system, and technology facilitated the strengthening of supraterritorial ties, generating exchanges that had a direct impact, for example, on the industrialization of territories or the use of languages in everyday life. These days I'm wondering: can we now speak of globalization in the past tense?

You are right Albert Sanchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​​​1965) when he says that his latest book is as unclassifiable as many of the characters that appear in it. The darkness of the heart (La Campana, 2025) mixes, with commendable skill, history, biographical essay, anthropology, unlikely anecdotes and the author's own experience. Cold skin, who traveled to the Congo in the late 1990s to write reports for an NGO and ended up discovering a surprise that turned his life upside down.