A good relationship with your father keeps you company and drives you throughout your life; a bad relationship with your father weighs you down and deforms you throughout your life. Matthew Tree (Barcelona, 1958), the London-born writer who has lived in Catalonia for decades and has produced his literary work in both English and Catalan, always had a conflictive and hurtful relationship with his father, a tormented and problematic man who, in turn, had an alcoholic and absent father. Be that as it may, however, a father is always a father, and, even long after they are dead (Tree's father died in 1994), children remember them, keep them in mind, and often need to understand them.In Almost Everything, a book that functions as a portrait of his father, as a sketch of an autobiography, and as a transcription and interpretation of existing literary materials, Matthew Tree sets out to understand the enigma that his father has always been for him. It is an enigma full of thorns and holes, because Tree remembers and writes from the awareness of many grievances and many wounds. He explicitly states that for a long time he blamed his father for the severe chronic obsessive disorder he has suffered for a large part of his life and which has at times made him feel dramatically uncomfortable in his own skin and led him to drink too much.Tree, in any case, does not write out of vengeful resentment, but out of a desire to investigate and understand. His father was the man who humiliated him in public, who had fits of rage and from whom he, as a son, needed to escape, but he was also the man he loved and who was capable of great displays of affection. In the initial pages, Tree explains that he does not want to settle accounts with his father, and perhaps this is true, but this does not detract from the fact that the whole book – and this is one of its virtues – has a ghostly air of an unfinished conversation.Sordid, gloomy and at the same time moving

The trigger for Tree's literary maneuver, originally written in English and translated into Catalan by Jordi Dausà Mascort, is the reading of his father's youth diaries, a reading that did not occur until years after finding them – and it is evident that this impasse denotes many things, from reverential respect to fear, disinterest, and repudiation. It is one of the axes of Almost Everything: the faithful transcription, only modestly commented, of what are supposed to be some of the most interesting and significant passages of young Michael Tree's diary production.Conscientious objector during World War II and in the midst of the blitz, “pacifist, socialist and Anglican,” a fervent believer tortured by the notion of sin, a young man with hormones boiling afflicted by complicated relationships with women and sex, a depressive son of a father prematurely destroyed by alcohol, a vocational writer who published three novels that passed without glory or shame and who, after leaving literature, lived submerged in a prosperous but very frustrating life, full of enervating self-pity and rage: the reader's impression when reading these diary fragments is that Michael Tree was made of good stuff, but that the moral rigidity of the time and personal circumstances corroded him. All in all, it has that air of sordidness, a bit grim and a bit moving, of Philip Larkin's poems.Philip Larkin.More than the father's annotations, and the reconstruction of his personality by the son, the most raw and confessional passages of the book are particularly interesting, those in which the son, that is, the author, tells – without prevarication, but also without immodest exhibitionism – the biographical, psychological and literary consequences of the bad relationship with his father. Free from bitterness and resentment, grateful for all the good things life has given him (partner, children, a home in Banyoles), Matthew Tree's conclusion about his father is generous and at the same time terribly stark: he was not a bad person, he was just a very unhappy man. Almost everything proves that painful and sad reproaches can also be a tribute.

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One of the most controversial aspects of both the articles and the television and radio appearances of Empar Moliner (Santa Eulàlia de Ronçana, 1966) are her criticisms of certain discourses and positions of feminism, discourses that, according to the writer, reinforce clichés (that of the strong male and that of the helpless and weak female), erase nuances and ignore differences and similarities between men and women. It is known, however, that preconceived ideas, personal convictions, or the clarity with which journalistic collaborations are made are never exactly the same as those with which literature is written. Bearing this in mind, it should not surprise us that Moliner's new novel, Instructions for Living Without Her, takes an element or motif that feminism always places at the center of its discourses – that of the woman burdened with duties and responsibilities who deforms, violates, and enslaves herself to the extreme in order to care for hers – and makes it its dramatic core.The plot premise of the novel is a bit convoluted, but it offers a lot of possibilities both from a narrative and formal point of view, as well as regarding the explanation of social codes and the psychological exploration of characters. The protagonist, Clàudia Pruna, is an author in her late fifties who has enjoyed considerable professional success for years: she writes novels that sell well, collaborates with TV and radio, publishes a daily newspaper article, has loyal readers... The common points with Moliner herself are quite evident, but they end there and, in reality, the question of whether the character is or is not a transcript of the author is of no importance.What is important is that the protagonist has just received a terminal medical diagnosis, knows that she will die in a few months, and suffers from the double economic and logistical hardship her family will face when she, the caregiver who changes her grandson's and grandmother's diapers and the provider who pays the bills and the mortgage, can no longer care for or provide. In what would be a particularly grim and harsh version of the mental load that many women have to manage in their daily routine, Clàudia Pruna makes an extravagant and radical decision: to continue acting as a caregiver and provider posthumously. This is why she spends her final months of life writing articles to be published after her death, this is why she instructs an admiring reader to learn to write like her (so she can continue producing and sending articles when she is no longer there), and this is why she devises a very complicated plan for her to be buried without the news of her death becoming public.A dysfunctional family

From these materials, Moliner constructs a convoluted but plausible artifact, dense yet agile, self-aware yet alive, in which the narrator's voice of the admiring reader, who is the one telling the story, overlaps with Pruna's voice, in which reflections on language go hand in hand with observations about society, in which the fragile and tormented male personality of the admiring reader contrasts with the decisive and hedonistic personality of the writer Pruna, and in which concerns for the family's well-being coexist with the description of an absolutely dysfunctional family life and, even, in an unstoppable process of degradation: the apathetic and neglectful husband, the very young and irresponsible daughter, the already very decrepit grandparents... The general picture is grotesque, and Moliner does not hesitate to emphasize it with details full of malice (the admiring reader's almost vaginal micropenis, the husband's tractor accident while picking his nose), but at the same time compensates for it with the protagonist's vitality and with gestures of unsentimental but profound tenderness. Moliner's elastic and concise prose, refined yet substantial, helps to shape and express a novel that is deeper and more ambitious than the title and editorial design might suggest.

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"Writing a chronicle should be an act of freedom," Empar Moliner said towards the end of the presentation of his new novel, Instructions for living without her (Column, 2026), to the readers who listened to her with devotion this Monday evening at the Finestres bookstore. Among the audience were a man who bore a striking resemblance to Michel Houellebecq—one of Moliner's favorite authors—a former director of TV3, a handful of journalism students, and someone who exuded an intense stench of tobacco, camouflaged by the perhaps even more pervasive fragrance of chewing gum.

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On a trip to Iceland in 2022, journalist and writer Pere Francesch Rom (Montbrió del Camp, 1981) found the ideal village to tell a story that had been brewing within him for years. Djúpivogur presented itself as the perfect place to send the novel's protagonist, a renowned musician who disappears overnight and serves as the novel's central figure. Don't forget your name (Column). "This town is the perfect refuge for a musician who decides to leave everything behind at the peak of his career, when he could fill 20 Olympic stadiums, and hide from the world," explains the writer. The starting point for this story comes from the announcement David Bowie made in 1973, when he said at a concert that it would be the last one in which he would appear as Ziggy Stardust. "It impacted me greatly, to the point that the book begins like this: the protagonist says goodbye to the audience at the last concert of his career," says Francesch.

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