The latest addition to my website is Maica Rafecas‘ El setembre i la nit (September and the Night). The novel tells the story of Anaïs whose family own a vineyard. However, the vineyard does not pay and they are faced with drought and disease. When the local authority decided to compulsorily purchase the vineyards in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ventura Ametller‘s Summa kaòtica (Summa Kaotica). This is one of the great Catalan novels, which has finally made it into English. It is set in Poel, based on Amettler’s hometown of Pals. It starts both with the birth of the Second Spanish Republic, founded in 1931, as well … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miquel de Palol‘s El jardí dels set crepuscles (The Garden of Seven Twilights). This is the first novel by the major Catalan writer to appear in English and it was well worth the wait. It is set in the near future, when nuclear war is taking place globally. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Almudena Sánchez‘ s Fármaco (Pharmakon). This is about Almudena Sánchez’s struggle with depression, which hit her in her early thirties. Unlike other novels/memoirs on depression, this is not a realist account of the depression. Rather it is a writer writing about her depression rather than a depressive giving … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eva Baltasar‘s Boulder (Boulder). Our narrator works as a mess-hall cook in various places in Chile, getting a job on a freighter early in the book. She is a complete loner, wanting only drink, tobacco and sex. In her travels she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist, and they … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jordi Cussà‘s Cavalls salvatges (Wild Horses). The story shows that in many small towns in Catalonia in the 1980s, most young people were heroin junkies. The story is narrated to a great extent by Lex, clearly based on the author, and he and virtually all of the fairly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Montserrat Roig‘s Ramona, adéu! (Goodbye, Ramona). The novel tells the story of three women, all called Ramona, from three successive generations. Ramona 1 lives in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and feels her life as a wife and mother is boring. She almost has an affair to liven … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joaquim Ruyra‘s Jacobé & Fineta This collection consists of two short stories but very well worth reading . Jacobé tells of a girl who looks after a young boy, Minguet when young but he notices that as she gets older she seems to be deteriorating and even going … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rosa Maria Arquimbau‘s Quaranta anys perduts (Forty Lost Years). The novel tells the story of Laura Vidal, a Barcelona woman, from Francesc Macià declaring Catalan independence (14 April 1931) to 1971. She becomes a dressmaker and does reasonably well. However, the vicissitudes of life in Catalonia affect her, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Llorenç Villalonga‘s Mort de dama [Death of a Lady]. This was Villalonga’s first book and was a wicked satire on the Mallorcan upper class of the day. The eponymous lady is Obdulia de Monteada and, as the title and the beginning of the book tell us, she is … Read more