Some time ago I spoke with the writer Elisenda Solsona about a shared sensation: the dissociation that we writers sometimes have when we read our own text written some time ago. It is a strange sensation because you know you wrote it, but you don't recognize yourself in it, as if someone else had written it. This dissociation also appears when a reader talks to you about a book or article, or discovers an intention that you don't remember, or that you weren't aware of having put there.This week I read Intermezzo, Sally Rooney's latest novel. The Catalan edition by Periscopi (translated by Ferran Ràfols) includes several laudatory reviews of the work and the author. Although I really enjoyed the book, reading them I felt the dissociation again, as if I had read one book and they had read another. Zadie Smith, one of the authors on the list, describes it well: few imitators come close to Rooney's level, and even fewer critics understand what is really going on in her novels. I wonder if Rooney experiences this amplified dissociation: thousands of readers constructing a book that doesn't quite resemble what she has in mind.In 1981, the French artist Sophie Calle created the work La filature. Calle asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her for a whole day. She, meanwhile, wrote a diary with all her impressions of the day. When she put together the detective's photos and observations with her own material, she was struck by the discrepancy between the external gaze and the intimate experience. Calle wondered who we are and how these two experiences fit into our own identity. Those of us who write, perhaps, do this tracking but in reverse: we leave traces so that someone (a reader or ourselves in the future) can follow us and return a version of ourselves that we no longer recognize.Dissociation, problem or opportunity?

The British philosopher Derek Parfit argued that personal identity is not absolute but a matter of degrees: we are not the same person we were, but someone connected to that person, more or less depending on how much we have changed. The regeneration of body cells would accompany this idea: skin, bones, or blood are continuously renewed, but most neurons accompany us throughout life. So the brain that thought that text remains the same, but the body that wrote it, does not. Perhaps it is the condition of all published writing, and dissociation is not a problem but an opportunity for encounter. The text is the place where two readers coincide without having read quite the same book, and where writers greet a past self, a body that no longer exists, from the other side of time. Perhaps writing consists precisely in this: accepting that our identity always ends up in the hands of someone else, even when that someone is ourselves.

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David Uclés is on his way to becoming the great champion of Rodoro's work. Elisenda Solsona is no slouch either. Within the framework of the CCCB exhibition on Mercè RodoredaHer talk this Monday before the more than four hundred people who filled the Hall, an enthusiastic audience, has become a festival of unrestrained praise. Rodoreda as a precursor of European magical realism (earlier and harsher than its Latin American counterpart), as an eternally innocent yet malevolent child, as an author of the everyday and terror, as a dreamlike and symbolic master. How could she be a not-so-good witch? It seems that in most of her texts, witches of all kinds and conditions appear...

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More than sixty Catalan authors They have traveled to Mexico to represent Barcelona at the 39th International Book Fair (FIL) From Guadalajara, where the city is the guest of honor. Ten of the participants summarize their journey across the Atlantic in their own words.

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This week the list of writers who will travel to Mexico was published. for the Guadalajara International Book Fair and my friend Elisenda Solsona is one of the guests. When we publish Natives: ten beastly tales (Comanegra), my daughter asked me which of the friends we had written the book with was my favorite writer. The joke made me laugh and made me think about when she liked them. The real spies and made me choose which one I liked best. Just like before, I felt bad about having to choose because, like the spies, my friends are all fantastic, but if I had to, I'd go with Alex and Eli (via Solsona), respectively. When she asked me why I chose her, I reflected on it: because of her overflowing imagination, I answered.

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