With the novel Scenarios Toni Sala completes his trilogy, which began with The boys and continued with Persecution. I sincerely believe that Scenarios It's the best. As I said in the title of that paper, I think it's a great novel. And it is so because of its content and the way it's written. The content is nothing less than a magnificent portrait of our country, of its current moment in which everything seems to have been in vain, in which people, starved, wander sleepwalking through their daily lives, as they say, aimless and without hope. Toni Sala achieves this portrait in a masterfully constructed way. Five main characters intertwined by thoughts and memories, by an imagination that jumps from one of their minds to another and weaves a story that can't be put down. Characters and landscapes, or if you will, intimately intertwined settings that make up an unforgettable text. There is a fabric that the language sustains, an exact language, with forays into the most degraded Catalan of today's youth, but rich when the speaker is an educated person or is the voice of a narrator who doesn't hesitate to infiltrate the voice of the characters without us realizing it. Reading'Scenarios It demands attention, of course. It's a great book that, when you delve into it, demands attention. Then the work unfolds and escapes, and it draws you in, provoking the mental pleasure of what it says and the literary pleasure of how it says it—if these two aren't one and the same. Reading it, it seemed to me that Toni Sala was using the old technique of the oratorio: a continuous musical fabric, made of language and scenery, which announces and introduces the characters' arias. These arias reflect and narrate. There's an entire chapter, titled "The Letter," which is the aria alone, perfect, linguistically indecisive, just as the character requests, emotive to the maximum, which the author's skill utilizes to define and expand on this character. The author uses these arias to construct a portrait of the country. An aria about theater, for example, in which the protagonist, who is an actor, explains, with all the ers and uts, his training, his history, and the very constitution of the theatrical act. There's another great aria about language, served as one of the monologues the actor recites. There's also an aria about the country's sexual reality, about the rejection of motherhood, about homosexuality, and dissatisfaction with one's own gender. A harsh perspective through the eyes of a nurse, a character obsessed with being a mother and not breaking the bloodline.

In the last eleven years Toni Sala (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1969) has published three novels that are three ways of approaching life and death. Scenarios (The Other) culminates the trilogy that began with The boys (L'Otra, 2014) and continued with Persecution (La Otra, 2019). Together they also form a portrait of Catalonia in the midst of the independence process and post-independence process. The writer, one of the most solid and least complacent voices in Catalan literature, now tells the story of Tomàs Niubó, a popular actor who suffers a road accident near Puigcerdà. This event brings him closer to Vadó, a fat and lonely man who finds him, and Olga, a nurse who works at the hospital where the actor will end up. They are the vertices of an introspective and exuberant narrative triangle, through which Sala delves into the minds of three wounded and simultaneously disoriented characters, as much as the society they inhabit.

There are days when you come back from vacation and enter a huge bookstore in your city, where, as soon as you walk through the door, the first thing you find is a selection of books under a sign that says Booktokers, a selection of books with flashy covers and unknown names, all of them thicker than they really are, the paper size, multiplying the words and paragraphs to feed a gregarious and hungry crowd), and then there is another wall lock with the bestsellers, the new releases (including news that have been on the street for a year) and the recommended books, some of which are incredible to recommend, although it shouldn't surprise you because you already know that in this bookstore recommended It's synonymous not with the bookseller's enthusiastic reading but with the payment the publisher has made to have their book in a prominent place, so you pass through the entrance and reach the half-hidden corner at the very end, behind a column, where Catalan writers have been punished, and there you find a book with a cover that not only tastes like churros (which are no longer sold) but also like iPhones, and that will be read for this reason alone: to be the imitation of a cover, to be a repetition. And on days like these you think: "Fuck books."

The title of the new novel by Toni Sala (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1969) is Scenarios, but it's the characters, and especially their voices, that carry the entire weight of the work, which is more reflective, speculative, and psychological than properly narrative. I mean that what the characters say, think, and explain is more important than the events that occur and are told with them. Conceived and structured as an exploration of what happens when people who have nothing in common meet by chance and interact, Scenarios It unfolds as a mosaic of psychologies and at the same time as a portrait of an era and a country: the depressed, debased, and sordidly erratic Catalonia of the post-pandemic and post-process. A phrase spoken by one of the protagonists, a famous actor ashamed of his success in audiovisual media and now in the process of reinventing himself as a theatrical stand-up comedian, defines the prevailing mood and general atmosphere of the novel: "I don't think you can pass it off with dignity."

Summer is coming to its final weeks and, with the change of season, so does the rentrée Literary. September is traditionally a month packed with new releases in the publishing market, many of which mark the start of the school year. We've selected the 25 most promising.

This July, in Sant Feliu Bay, we have two new developments: the disappearance of the beach bars and the appearance of a wooden fence placed in the middle of the beach to protect the eggs of a loggerhead turtle that came to lay its eggs just after the Sant Joan festival. Volunteers stand guard all day, in three-hour shifts. At night, there's a security guard. "We're not police!" a volunteer who came specifically from Tona tells me. Turtles keep coming, but people don't respect them: they film with their cell phones, flash their lights, shout, and use flashlights.Oh, a turtle, I'm going to take a picture."Then the turtle leaves and doesn't lay eggs." "Twenty years ago, turtles didn't come here," another volunteer tells me. "Now the water is warmer and turtles come here, and we need to spread the word so people know. A year or two ago, a man laid his towel on the beach and a baby turtle came out. The egg laying hadn't been detected."