Read Joan Sales

It is always good to reread or discover Joan Sales. It has been especially during the last decade that Incerta glòria—his great novel, one of the best about the Civil War—has experienced a resurgence in its reception and consideration inside and outside Catalonia. The precarious institutional year dedicated to him in 2012, coinciding with the centenary of his birth, served, unlike Espriu's anniversary, to regenerate readers and activate a couple of important projects.

While Montserrat Casals' biography of the writer was delayed—she could not finish it: cancer ended her life—the theatrical adaptation arrived, directed by Àlex Rigola, which could be seen from May to June 2015 in the small hall—a detail that should not be overlooked—of the National Theater. This spring, its film version premiered, directed by Agustí Villaronga, which condensed into just under two hours the almost six hundred pages of the novel: since 2012 it has been sold separately from the epilogue—more phantasmagorical and elegiac—of El vent de la nit.

Over the last five years, in addition to being regularly reprinted in Catalan, Joan Sales' Incerta glòria has enjoyed remarkable reception in German, Romanian, and English translation. The latter was chosen by The Economist as one of the ten most relevant fiction publications of 2014.

Even so,Uncertain Glorystill receives, from time to time, some reductionist attack. Recently, there has been an attempt to disqualify it as if it were a variant of Gironella. We could not understand this as an unfair criticism because—worse—it is the confirmation of a lack of knowledge. There are those who, from an "a priori," still deny the notable literary quality of Joan Sales' novel. It has even been written that the prose ofUncertain Gloryis mediocre. The formal and ethical consistency of the novel can easily refute it.

Unlike a significant percentage of fiction published in Catalan between the 1950s and early 1970s —the first version of the book, which won the Joanot Martorell Prize, is from 1956; the fourth and definitive, from 1971—, Joan Sales's prose is agile, direct, and current.

Incerta glòria is a skillful combination of ideas and emotions, in which the author knows how to fit the disillusioned solemnity of Juli Soleràs's monologues with the crystalline tone —of a charming innocence— of Trini Milmany's letters and Lluís de Brocà's gloomy descriptions of Aragonese villages and the front-line atmosphere. The conversations have an unusual force. The stories the soldiers tell each other sometimes make you smile, as with Cruells's sleepwalking attack that almost cost him his life; at other times they give you goosebumps, as in the account of the discovery of a donkey's corpse during Soleràs's expeditions to a cove where, as a child, he spies on a foreign couple kissing: intrigued by the animal's swelling, the young man pricks it with a sea rush, and when he pulls it out, the hole emits a sound that is like the whistle of a "mouth full of saliva," an image as disturbing as the detail about the male lover's mouth, which has "magnificent teeth," "white and insolent as only perfect brutes have them."

During the last five years, in addition to being regularly reprinted in Catalan, Incerta glòria has enjoyed a remarkable reception in German, Romanian, and English translation. The latter was chosen by The Economist as one of the ten most relevant fiction publications of 2014.

In Uncertain Glory, the horror of the mummies of the friars exhumed by the anarchists and displayed around the altar of an Aragonese monastery, simulating the last marriage officiated in that sacred space —the groom "has been given a candle" (...) in a grotesque way— coexists with Trini's "floating and nebulous" conversion to Christianity. Whoever seeks uncritical and blind holy cards inUncertain Gloryyou will not find them: faith, in any case, is attacked by the savage counterpoint not only of war, but of the attempt to maintain a life as a couple that is a fiction of a lacerating perversity.

"We come from the obscene and go to the macabre," Juli Soleràs admits on more than one occasion. Enigmatic, idealistic, and contradictory, Soleràs is the antihero of the book, capable of wandering from one side to the other while Luis, instead of thinking about Trini and his son, becomes obsessed with Carlana's "painful aura." The disillusionment—which he has carried since childhood, and which is symbolically evidenced through his toothache—allows him to question party ideologies and marmoreal affiliations. At this point, reducing a novelist of so many nuances—however controversial one may wish—to the condition of ultracatholic or parafascist—for example—is so biased that, by comparison with French literature that celebrates quality more than ideology, it is like returning to an imaginary battlefield where verbal bullets are fired indiscriminately, without any justification, and where the victim, no matter which side, is always good literature.