He has a lively, awake gaze, trained to capture details and microscopic stories within the small history that surrounds us, ingredients with which to feed his frenetic literary activity that, in his facet as a writer, he has been exercising as a freelance for fifteen years, with more than forty published titles of all styles except theater. "Some of them ---he admits with humor--- even frankly bad."
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But Sebastià Bennassar is something, much more than, simply, a writer. Like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, this forty-something Mallorcan currently based in Olot is a literary agitator endowed with quantum powers that allow him to be in a lot of places at once. As a writer, as an event organizer or participant in them, as an editor, as a head of reading clubs (three, no less), as a promoter of Catalan letters and, above all, and most importantly, as a true Tasmanian devil of literature.
And it shows when he speaks. How he expresses himself. With that passion, loud voice, love for what he has read, appetite for what remains to be read, broad gestures. A child's smile before a shop window full of adventures, a private world that never sleeps.
When "writing" is more than just writing
When talking about key moments, epiphanies, those instants when a decision takes shape in your head and there is a step that has no turning back, Sebastià talks about his 17 years: "I sent a story to a contest organized by a newspaper in Mallorca and I won. That's when I started to see the possibility of making a living from writing."
What perhaps Sebastià himself didn't know, at that moment, is that, in his life, writing was going to be much more than just typing. Perhaps he realized this at 29, "when I left a permanent job as section chief at the Diari de Balears to come to Barcelona to study Humanities at Pompeu Fabra. Studying as an adult has been fundamental, because I studied knowing what I wanted." He would finish these studies with the extraordinary final degree award, something he is especially proud of: "coming from a working-class family, for me it is something very special."
Since then, those fifteen years of frantic writing have passed, which, given everything else, seem like forty-five. He has ended up directing the collection Lo Marraco Negre, from Pagès Editors, and Marrajo, from the Lleida-based publisher Milenio. He has promoted countless cultural initiatives, conferences, congresses, round tables, and literary festivals of crime fiction such as Lloseta Negra, Tiana Negra, or Gràcia Llegeix. He directs Bearn, an online cultural magazine, and has been very active in matters such as the Association of Young Writers in Catalan Language.
Meanwhile, he had time to go to Lisbon for four years: "I think the biggest madness I did was setting up the Casal Català de Lisboa and promoting the magazine Capicua, dedicated to the translation of texts from Catalan to Portuguese and vice versa."
His latest recklessness, "buying the Xandri publishing house," a project that, like all the others, he faces with an infectious enthusiasm.
With B for Barcelona, and for Bennassar
"In Barcelona, I have lived some of the most fascinating moments of my life, but also in this city, at the door of my house, is where my best friend, the poet Salvador Iborra, was murdered, and that is something very painful." Barcelona can hurt, like all great loves.
Bennassar is a living and brilliant piece of the culture of this city, of which "what bothers me greatly is the fact that certain of its inhabitants believe that only Barcelona, Cerdanya, and Empordà exist." And that's it.
But, at the same time, one cannot help but love the place where "the birth, just a few streets away, in the Raval, of two fascinating writers like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Jaume Fuster" took place, the city where "Jacint Verdaguer practiced his exorcisms" and, of course, the place where Cacaolat was invented.
His visit ends. Books and articles do not write themselves, and his is a name that shines brightly in the very well-stocked literary scene of Catalan crime fiction.
Who knows. Perhaps he will return around noon, if he has time, for a menu, provided he is not tempted by a portion of his beloved meatballs with cuttlefish. Or perhaps, already in the evening, he will drop by this bar again to down a Bombay Sapphire with Schweppes lemon or, failing that, a Caipirinha, and ask again for Van Morrison's The Healing Game to play in the background, while he discusses awesome books, his own or others'.
Come whenever you come, there will always be room at the bar for Sebastià Bennassar to tell us what literary messes he has gotten into this time.