The restaurant and cocktail bar Jok, hidden on a mezzanine in Barcelona's Eixample, with its modernist decor and rosé velvet sofas, seems like the perfect setting for the cutest Victorian podcast out there. I'm going to see the "Punkis Decimonòniques" precisely on the day they disband: this will be their last show after five years of delving into the best novels by Victorian female writers, most of which have recently been published in Catalan by Viena, in collections such as Club Victòria and Petits Plaers. Indeed, their editor, Blanca Pujals, along with the then bookseller of La Carbonera, Carlota Freixenet, are the "Victorian ladies of the 21st century".

The plot premise of Picnic at Hanging Rock could not be more suggestive, purer, and more perverse at the same time. We are in Australia, on Valentine's Day in the year 1900. A group of adolescent girls from good families at a Victorian boarding school go for a picnic in an imposing spot, in the middle of wild nature, at the foot of an enormous and fascinating volcanic mesa. During the picnic, three of the girls – virginal, innocent, full of joy and curiosity, neatly dressed in white, like angels – and one of the governesses accompanying them disappear while exploring the Rock, basaltic black in color, full of caves and cavities. Of the four who disappeared, only one of the girls reappears. The others are never heard from again.When Joan Lindsay (1896-1984) published the novel in 1967, it was immediately successful and became a cult work, to the point that many readers thought that the events described in it were real. The cult surrounding the work grew even more when filmmaker Peter Weir, author of masterpieces such as Gallipoli, Witness and Master and Commander, adapted it in 1975 and made a wonderful film, full of impure poetry, of grim purity, of enigma and subtle perversity. In this sense, it is very good news that Lindsay's novel has been published for the first time in Catalan, even though the novel is inferior to the film. When I say it is inferior, I mean it is more conventional and has a less hypnotic and less turbulently seductive expressive richness. In any case, the edition published by Viena, in a good translation by Jordi Martín Lloret, is excellent.The irresistible attraction to primordial nature

The symbolic play of forces proposed by the novel could not be more clear, but it has an impactful expressive and emotional power, and allows for multiple readings that not only do not exclude each other but complement and enrich each other. The girls, with their European education, with their meticulously regulated and directed lives, with their showy dresses – boots, petticoats, corsets, gloves...– that physically protect them from direct contact with the exuberant and unknown sensory world that surrounds them, represent the order and civilization of the old continent, they are daughters of the immutable moral and civic-political rigidity that articulates the British Empire and Englishness. During the picnic, however, three of the girls, led by the most beautiful and charismatic of them all, separate from the others. They feel an irresistible attraction to the telluric forces of primordial nature, and they pay the price.As I have already said, this interpretation based on the binary of civilized England-savage Australia extends to other contrasts: childhood and adulthood; virginity and the discovery of sexuality; rationality and atavisms; reality and dream; the familiar and the exotic; the radiance of what is understood and the dark fog of the ineffable... From the disappearance of the two girls and the governess, Joan Lindsay unfolds a narrative in a tone of realistic chronicle that initially focuses on the police attempt to resolve the mystery and the search for the missing, but which, soon, upon realizing that the search is fruitless and that the mystery is irresolvable, focuses on the succession of dramas caused by the incomprehensible disappearance. This is what happens when, in the heart of a rational and civilized world, you introduce a fact or an element that, with its impenetrable existence, disrupts everything: the secure solidity of civilization dissolves into the uncertainty of mystery.Precisely, what makes Peter Weir's excellent film better than Joan Lindsay's notable novel is that the filmmaker never abandons a tone of telluric poetry and oneirism, as the writer does in many chapters to adopt more realistic ways. Even more so: Weir underlines the grimly ineffable dimension of what he tells with a general dreamlike atmosphere and a soundtrack –sustained by the hypnotic melodies of a pan flute– that is of a precious and unsettling primitive delicacy.

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Although she has to use crutches due to a recent fall, Marta Pessarrodona (Terrassa, 1941) retains the energy and enthusiasm that have accompanied her for decades. She opens the door to her home in Valldoreix once again to ARA for a double reason: she has been chosen as the opening speaker for the new edition of the Barcelona Poesia festival, which takes place from May 14 to 21, and she is presenting a new poetry book, Re(visions), which is about to hit bookstores. Published by Viena five years after Tot m'admira (2021), it revisits the author's family members, friends, and loves, including her last dog, Queta, who died in an accident just over a year ago.

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Jezebela novel that Irène Némirovsky (kyiv, 1903-Auschwitz, 1942), published in 1936, begins with the trial of an older, "extremely wealthy" and pretentious woman, Gladys Eysenach, accused of murdering her lover of twenty years. Throughout the first chapter, which essentially serves as a prologue, we witness the reconstruction of the crime scene through the interrogation of the accused and a large gallery of witnesses. Written almost like a Hollywood screenplay—with sharp, snappy dialogue, secrets revealed, worldliness, mystery, and drama—this prologue unfolds before the reader all the ingredients of what appears to be a passionate melodrama. We discover, because she herself has confessed, that the wealthy, elegant, and cosmopolitan Eysenach did indeed commit the crime. And we believe we also know her motivations: jealousy, spite, and mad love. However, after the prologue, the novel flashes back and proceeds to reconstruct the protagonist's life from her earliest youth. What we end up discovering is far worse than we imagined.

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As an editor, do you find any connection between your approach to books and your approach to wine?

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János Székely (Budapest, 1901–Berlin, 1958) was a conscious and sophisticated anti-fascist. A journalist, screenwriter (first in 1920s Germany and later in Hollywood), and novelist, he went into exile from his native Hungary when reactionary power was born. He later settled in America, fleeing a Europe occupied by Hitler's armies. It is curious, in this sense, that the protagonist of his short novel This is not done to Svoboda. (1940) is the complete opposite: a primary, pre-ideological, instinctive anti-fascist.

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A month in the countryside, by the English editor and novelist J.L. Carr (1912–1994), is what it appears to be: a simple, vital, and amiable novel, a "rural idyll"—as the author himself calls the very brief preface—soaked in bittersweet nostalgia, a charming story about our human condition. But it is also much more. The placid summer sunshine that bathes and warms every page of the novel, as well as the good-naturedness and predisposition toward happiness of its protagonists, hide the memory of bitterly cold, muddy winters, broken hearts, traumatized memories, and horrific wounds. Wise without grandiloquence, Carr's novel, originally published in 1980 and now translated into Catalan by Dolors Udina with her usual skill, brings to mind that memorable verse by Leonard Cohen that says: "Everything has a chink: that's how the light gets in."

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