On the eve of Saint Narcís, actress Àngels Gonyalons offered an excellent dramatized reading of stories by Caterina Albert at the Teatre de Salt, as part of the Temporada Alta program, in co-production with the Festival Clàssics of Barcelona. Four stories by the writer from L'Escala, known by the pseudonym Víctor Català, truly poignant, with touches of humor but very harsh and striking, of an impressive modernity that denounces, without mincing words, the sexism and violence of the patriarchal society. They are short stories from different collections about the lives of women in small rural towns at the turn of the 20th century, involving forced marriages, rapes, and murders. Poet Blanca Llum Vidal was in charge of choosing the stories and selecting some fragments, and Sergi Belbel signs the direction, intelligently guiding Gonyalons' reading, who was very committed and communicative.

In 2007, the Nobel Prize in Literature celebrated the long, prestigious and committed literary career of Doris Lessing, who received the news with the calm of her 88 years, just as she was arriving home loaded with groceries.

"What grace and what freshness, what naturalness, in her stories!", he wrote in 1958, in Mercè Rodoreda, an almost nonagenarian Victor Catalan, the pseudonym under which Caterina Albert (l'Escala, 1869-1966) signed all her books. The author of Loneliness had been impressed by Twenty-two stories, which Rodoreda had published after a two-decade hiatus in publishing. "Too often, some who claim to write in Catalan use such a fantastical vocabulary and construction that, when I come across language as natural and authentic as yours, it feels like a major celebration," he insists. "How charming and fresh your stories are!" he said.

In the last few days I've had the chance to browse through two newly published books that I found spectacular. One of them is the essay by Elvira Prado-Fabregat. Dark Nature. Imagination and ecology based on 'Solitude'Published by Barcino. And on the other hand, the Guide to Catalan Fantastic Creatures Published by Comanegra, with texts by Joan de Déu Prats and illustrations by Maria Padilla Climent.

The day all the laws of nature that guide behavior have been discovered, human beings will no longer be responsible for their actions. This is the fear that made a 19th-century classic like Fyodor Dostoevsky –an engineer by training– strongly criticized the rationalization in Notes from Underground (in Catalan, by Angle Editorial, translated by Miquel Cabal). Published in 1864 in Russian, it is a novel about a frustrated and furious civil servant who dedicates himself to plotting impossible revenge and, at the same time, offers a harsh portrait of the challenges of the time and the future prospects of a society in crisis. Among the merits of Dostoevsky's book is a visionary note: the prediction of the algorithms that today decide what we read, what we listen to, or even with whom we should have sexual relations. Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky feared that all human actions would end up being mathematically computed: "Everything will be calculated and established with such precision that there will be no more action and adventure in the world."