Catalonia is a strange country where almost everyone has given birth to a book and where there is a much greater number of writers than readers. The essential paradox of this supposedly literary diada lies in the contrast between the torrent of texts that spring from the mass media (to the unbearable plague of cooks, comedians, and politicians of the tribe, this year have been added the news presenters, a maelstrom woven by ghostwriters against which the long-suffsuffering writers struggle to survive with a much higher literary level than we ourselves attribute to them) and the fact that reading quality texts in Catalan is already a rarity.
I will not join the whiny thesis of many culturetas according to which Toni Cruanyes is to blame for Catalans not reading Proust (by the way, devour El temps retrobat, the thirteenth installment of the recherche that the great Josep Maria Pinto is about to finish for Viena); the book is also a commercial object and it is entirely logical that the media and influencers stick their noses in there to earn a small extra income and that, in turn, even the most prim writers end up losing their minds to appear in the press. Elitism, in Catalonia, is the homeland of rentiers.
Enough has already been said about all of this, and there's no need to insist. Of all of it, what still surprises me is the cult value and intellectual legitimacy that this object called a book maintains. Whenever Sant Jordi approaches, many of my colleagues remind me that, after twenty years of writing articles, it's incomprehensible that I still haven't written a book. The little gazettes are fine (they affirm with a look of disgust, as if journalistic literature were something akin to expelling a fart), but someone like you has (sic) to write a book. Without an essay or a novel, they affirm, stroking my shoulder, no one will see you as a philosopher, Berni, and you'll always be the enfant terrible of the country. My editor, who decades ago had the temerity to commission a book from me about my old neighborhood, and my putative brother-in-law, who has proposed a text that, if I make a little effort, will be sufficiently decent (if he's reading this, he shouldn't worry; writing it doesn't excite me much, but I'll finish it because I promised my sister), also think this way. All this turra, in short, serves to emphasize the stress our tribe has to publish books, a cocaine-like urge that is reduced to a thousandth when it comes time to read them.
Whenever Sant Jordi approaches, many of my colleagues remind me that, after twenty years of writing articles, it's incomprehensible that I still haven't written any bookIn the same way that I have always believed that reading is an anomalous act by natureand that the act of forcing our poor students to read (texts that, too often and due to age or historical contextualization, we know for a fact they will not be able to understand) is an outrage, the act of closing a text and disseminating it seems equally pornographic to me. To all this, which are very cheap excuses, is added a mixture of laziness and cowardice. Without disparaging article writing, I must agree with my friends that this is a profession ofsprinters, much more muscular than cerebral, and that the cliché according to which there is no better way to kill a novelist/essayist than to commission a daily article has some truth to it.
In turn, if someone wants to write articles in this monstrous country with a minimum of independence of criteria, they must reserve great energy to break the ice of censorship, political correctness, and cretinism, which makes it difficult to have any mental space left to novelize your Oedipal relationship with your mother or make cheap autofiction about the first masturbation you gave yourself. Luckily, some very patient friend has given me the option of editing a compilation of articles for me, so as not to die as an agraphic bon vivant.
Whatever the reason, this may be my last Sant Jordi as a writer without books. This will make me enjoy it especially. Starting next year, you see, I will be part of the malevolent wheel of professionals and people legitimized by a simple book spine. How horrible.
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