Other Spanish literary systems are completely autonomous, often disconnected from each other. Thus, this accelerated selection, like every year, has the primary virtue of rediscovering the vigor of national cultural traditions. It’s an unknown vigor and above all it’s a contrasting warmth. What Carlota Rubio, Iban Zaldúa and María do Cebreiro Rábade offer us, privileged spectators respectively of Catalan, Basque and Welsh literature, is to show us first-rate authors who practice everything, from comedy to storytelling, from history to poetry, from theater to repetition. Some transcend their tradition—like Marina Garcés or Eider Rodríguez—but the majority do not. It is worth reading them. The selection of Catalan literature is chosen by the team of critics of Quadthe Catalan cultural supplement of EL PAÍS.
Catalan
By Carlota Rubio
The intruder
Irene Pujadas
The Altra Yes H&O
In this novel, which resembles a story inspired by Kafka, Calvin and Beckett, Diana experiences an incongruity and must go deep into her body to find its core and repair the damage. Then you realize that being inside is hell and nothing knows where that core is. Happy birthday (for now, the first Catalan writer to publish fiction in the prestigious The New Yorker) updates the adventure novel to talk about the difficulty of defining too closely what is observed.
Read Ponç Puigdevall’s review (in Catalan)
Scripture
Perejaume
The Altra
As always in his written work, Perejaume mixes the essay and the poetry and makes them indistinguishable. In the different texts that come together in The Writing, a book that takes the name of the tributary river of La Noguera Pallaresa, it raises questions about what unites writing and nature. In the first part, aphorisms and brief poetic texts; in the second, three long texts: L’arboricultor, a commission by Xavier Albertí for the TNC, L’Escrita, the result of an intervention by the UPF, and Dodona, a journey to the Greek oracle.
Read Ponç Puigdevall’s review (in Catalan)
The passion of strangers
Marina Garcés
Gutenberg Galaxy
Friendship is a bond without institutions that define it and without contracts that regulate it, according to Marina Garcés, with a philosophical tradition with too much consensus. This is why this essay is dedicated to exploring friendship not as a virtuous refuge but as a sometimes problematic and contradictory encounter. Run away from The Book of Gilgamesh On Facebook, Garcés analyzes friendship as this fortuitous desire for a way of being in another’s world that he never achieves.
Read Anna Pazos’ review (in Catalan)
Screenplays
Tony Sala
The Altra
The protagonist of ScreenplaysTomàs Niubó, is a theater actor specialized in monologues who was the victim of an accident one night on a secondary road in La Cerdaña. With a series of supporting characters around her, Toni Sala concludes the call Trilogy of Evil with a soap opera which, more than ever, diverts the plot to deal with theater, vocation, solitude, isolation and the bonds that spontaneously form between the people of a disenchanted Catalonia.
Read Ponç Puigdevall’s review (in Catalan)
The service of these protocols
Ingrid Guardiola
Arcadia
In this essay, its author recognizes the face of the novel The intruderby Irene Pujadas, who describes the inside of a body as a bureaucratic system. After a decade leading cultural projects, Guardiola explores the protocols and automation processes that generate our lives, from public workplaces in the cultural sector to platform capitalism. Guardiola investigates all these tools of coercion and proposes new reports to gain political awareness.
Read the interview with Ingrid Guardiola. By Pau Luque
Basque
By Iban Zaldua
Patrizioak is plebeioak. Gure prosaren emergentzian
Kepa Altonaga
Pamiela
If anyone has contributed in recent years to the progress of the essay as a literary genre in Basque letters, it is the zoologist and EHU professor Kepa Altonaga (Loiu, 1958). He continues his journey with delicious scientific essays in the tradition of S. Jay Gould, always linked in one way or another to Basque themes, of which classical literature constitutes his other field of interest. In this book, once again this last subject, initially dry, shines with ingenuity and even gives rise to debates, in a wide range of approaches, more “patrician” or more “popular”, which mark the historical development of prose in Basque. Combat rehearsal that looks to the past to debate the present.
Silhouette
Harkaitz Cano
Susa
Harkaitz Cano (Lasarte-Oria, 1975) does not speak Swedish. And he returns on this occasion with a little metallic joy, a novel composed, in the manner of Perfect vacuumby Stanisław Lem (1971), reviews, reviews, diatribes and letters to the director about another supposed novel of the same title, Silhouettewritten by a certain Ibarbia, whose theme – which, ironically, had been treated in the same Cano en Twist, from 2011 – is the subject of a secuestro. A work that opens – opens forever? — our theme Cosait is well known as the Basque conflict. He says that in the euskaldún panorama not enough conventional serials have been written (that’s not sure), but, in any case, they live in unconventional serials, if they are like this one!
Lakioa
Josu Goikoetxea
Elkar
European literature fortunately continues to produce good story books. It is the first by an author, Josu Goikoetxea (Gernika, 1974) who, despite a long career – he was a member, with Harkaitz Cano and others, of the seminal Lubaki Banda – had only published one poem. A collection of reports in the best sense of the word, with a wide range of themes, techniques and approaches, which range from disturbing to humorous, and among those which highlight those dedicated to the echoes of the Basque dichoso conflict, to bertsolarismo – a world that the writer knows very well – and to a new generation of our artistic avant-gardes.
Dena Zulo Bera Zen
Eider Rodriguez
Susa
The euskaldune readers —and ready, I imagine, Hispanohablantes— we are enthusiastic: the writer Eider Rodríguez (Errenteria, 1977) vuelve al género que mejor se le da, el cuento. Six new miniatures which separate, from what we could conventionally call “realism”, the small miseries – but also the vital triumphs – of middle-aged couples, of younger precariats, of friendship between young women of the generation or of an elderly lesbian couple. An apparent senility which hides a very laborious density and even, in certain cases – this seems to me a novelty – a certain symbolic background.
Against
Ane Zubeldia Magriña
Susa
The share of the collective speech Mejillón Tigre, Ane Zubeldia Magriña (plume name by Ane García López, Hondarribia, 1994) is accompanied by a remarkable first collection of poems, four sections of which translated as “Dance Exercises”, “Fricciones”, “El mismo paisaje, una y otra vez” and “Tocar semper es” suggest the book’s defeats: the body, movement, sensoriality and walking/wandering. Fortunately, Zubeldia’s proposal is set in many similar locations, which tend to be more mystical and grandiose. “Nunca / necesito un dios / salvo / when I lose a pendiente,” the play begins, “I don’t believe in an interventionist god.” Read – and reread – quietly.
Gallego
By María do Cebreiro Rabade
The fools who weren’t. Mulleres at the Conxo asylum (1985-1936)
Carmen V. Valina
Galaxy
By deleting the archives of the Conxo psychiatric hospital between its founding and the disaster of 1936, historian Carmen V. Valiña saves the lives of women who suffered long reprisals. Conxo is the same space where Rosalía de Castro decorated her testamentary novel The main locomotive and the same thing in which Guattari located the European avant-garde of antipsychiatry. We look forward to the report on what is happening there today.
Adeline
Sandra Lodi
Galaxy
Even since the end of the 20th century we are witnessing a golden age of Galician comics, with renowned works like those of Miguelanxo Prado or David Rubín and a powerful group of creators among whom Sandra Lodi is credited. Her implacable Adelina, a character constructed in an elliptical style and enraged both in the text and in the back, will enter the history of the illustrated album as an emblem of resistance on the ground in the face of this slow shipwreck that is life, just before the ways in which neoliberalism attempts to regulate age and death.
A touch of tenderness
Gonzalo Hermo
Gunpowder Chan
After a decade of state canonization of Gallegian poetry, some of you are redefining, at a humble but not tumultuous pace, what the future of lyric poetry could be. Alongside the consolidation of Lorena Souto and the emergence of Sara Martínez Bello, there is a return home (in the real and figurative sense) of Gonzalo Hermo. A touch of tenderness confirms what little we know about memory: memories are memories of memories and in reality what we saved (the mother, the body, the sea) in the past, in this form, never there.
Newspapers (1938 and 1945)
Sarah Alonso
Alvarellos
From the beginning of the century we knew the terrible story of Syra Alonso, example of republican dignity and wife of the artist Francisco Miguel, shot dead after the military coup of 1936. The exhumation of the painter’s body gave birth to this work, which is much more than a reissue which, among other materials, includes Alonso’s brief literary piece “Three Men”. This woman who, before the war, had contributed to the creation of the magazine Alfarhe would eventually publish a story about his homeless children in America in the magazine in which Rulfo was publishing. Gallegian memory is transatlantic.
Impact of Muller calculations
AveLina Pérez
Xerais
Even though theater is often not written to be read, it is always interesting to appear in the way an author (in this case the author) says in words the score of what, one day, will ultimately be written. And so the Álvaro Cunqueiro prize for theatrical texts was awarded for the second time to AveLina Pérez, an author who, like the Cunqueiro de Poems about if and noI have a hunch that through its deployment in an Ella and an unnamed Ella, some form of justice might be achieved. But here, without pity.
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