The first book I ever read was El tren que va perdre una roda (The Train That Lost a Wheel). I’ve never remembered the author’s name. Is it because only books matter? I also remember that I borrowed it from the bibliobús, the mobile library. Señor Granados, who taught the children of Santa Eulàlia de Puig-oriol, a lively village in the Lluçanès region, urged us to get cards for this library on wheels that stopped in the village square one day. We were very lucky to have señor Granados. He made us read aloud fragments of the Spanish classics and those “reading classes” awoke in me a taste for words, the images they suggested and the stories that some words string together with others. I suppose all that fell on fertile ground: a father who was always willing to tell stories and a mother who spoke a language flavoured by a lifetime at the kitchen range. All of us listened to the stories you can hear in the village shop or inn. Then, we can also add the priest, mossèn Jaume who, towards the end of the Franco regime, handed out the magazine Cavall Fort (comics too) among the kids. Yet all that would certainly amount to nothing if I hadn’t spent my adolescence in a village where there wasn’t much to do. If I’d been a sporty type, that would have settled matters but, being of the pensive ilk, I soon discovered that reading was a mine of pleasure. One page leads to another and you’re already hooked.

I grew up, as a reader, at a time when the Catalan publishing world was fast churning out translated works – in legendary collections like Esparver, MOLC, MOLU, Clàssics Moderns, MOLU S.XX, A tot Vent, el Cangur, Escorpí... of cheap and accessible books. It was also the time of the Latin American boom. I had loquacious parents and neighbours who loved the oral story and maybe that’s why I, too, started to recount what was happening to me, with great attention to detail, and one day they told me I was a chatterbox. Then I quietened down a bit and began to write. All of this might explain why I became a writer (if I ever did). One day, when I was helping my father to load firewood I heard an interview on the radio with the author of several best sellers. I liked the way the man described how he filled his time (but prefer not to give his name so I don’t have to blush).

Not long after that I was gripped by the vice of buying books. And reading them. I kept making discoveries. Science fiction. Pedrolo. Rodoreda. Verne. Pla. Kafka. The crime novel collection “La Cua de palla”. Forster. Woolf. Kasperle en el castillo de Altocielo (Harlequin in Heaven-High Castle). El Hòbbit (The Hobbit). La por a la llibertat (The Fear of Freedom). Joc brut (Foul Play). Niuada de gentilhomes (A Nest of Gentlefolk). Els promesos (The Betrothed). Temps difícils (Hard Times). L’home invisible (The Invisible Man). El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Coronel). Shogun. They were books handed out by the bank, Caixa de Catalunya. Those were the days. The only books many families – my family included – had at home were those that the banks gave to their clients on Saint George’s Day, Sant Jordi, the book festival. I should also say, in defence of my parents that, from time to time, after we learned to read, they bought books for me and my sisters. La Marona (Little Mother), the “Patufet” stories, El urbano Ramón (The Policeman Ramon), Història de Catalunya il·lustrada (Illustrated History of Catalonia), Els cinc les passen negres (Five Get into a Fix), Los hijos del capitán Grant (Captain Grant’s Children), Heidi, La plaça del Diamant (The Time of the Doves), Pipi Calcesllargues (Pippi Longstocking), Pinotxo (Pinocchio), Grans Esperances (Great Expectations), El tren de les quatre cinquanta (4.50 from Paddington)... were bought at the Violí shop in Prats or the Anglada Bookship in Vic. Or in other wonderful places. Yes, yes, I remember them, all mixed up: Zipi y Zape (the Zipe and Zape comics), Història de dues ciutats (A Tale of Two Cities), Miguel Strogoff (Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar), La crida del bosc (The Call of the Wild), Assassinat a l'Orient Express (Murder on the Orient Express). Reading was such an amazing thing then.

With time, you start looking for criticism, essays, biographies, literary studies, the supplements of some newspapers. As an “innocent” reader, you start “wising up” and maybe you also start making your life more complicated. Some of my references have lasted for ages and others not so long. There are also discoveries and the rediscoveries you make when you’re over forty. I suppose that reading leads to writing and, if you have an Olivetti at home, then you set about it. Later, you like it minimally. You’ve “taken the first lick” as they say in my village. Finding a publisher is always difficult but one fine day you achieve it. I’ve always tried to link the words of my tribe with ideas from everywhere and experimental techniques. Prague, Ireland, Paris, heartland America. Vic, Girona, Canet de Mar. It all has an effect. And Barcelona. I couldn’t understand the world without Barcelona. I am, and always will be, a village boy though. You think that this story of my shaping as a writer is true but it’s also false. I mean, there could be another story that is completely different to this one and it would be true and false as well. Literature is a lie that tells a truth and also a truth that tells a lie. I know that thanks to the writers I admire. Among the ones that come to mind right now I’d mention Virginia Woolf, Josep Pla, Bohumil Hrabal, Pierre Michon, Marc Twain, Faulkner, Calders, García Márquez, Rodoreda, Perucho, Porcel, and Capote. If I’d written this yesterday, or was going to write it tomorrow, I would have named Ruyra, Trabal, Gogol, Proust, Pushkin, Nabokov and Josep Maria de Sagarra. And the poets. Espriu. Sunyol. Salvat. M. Mercè Marçal. Casasses. Vinyoli. March. Estellés. Oliver. And I left out Balzac. Monzó. Sales. Verdaguer. Ibarz. Irving. Roth. Carver. Dickens. Joyce. Sebald. Flannery O'Connor... I’m talking about authors when I should be talking about works. I’m contradicting myself. I shouldn’t make lists. I’m certainly overlooking some very important books, for example Menys que zero (Less Than Zero) by Bret Easton Ellis, which was a shock at the time (yet I’ve never read anything else by him). I think that writing, more than anything else, is being guilty of reading.