I'm a good reader or at least one that reads quite a lot. And, as happens with a lot of people who like reading and with fairly well-defined tastes, there comes a time when you want to try it for yourself. It's what Proust said about reading, its limitations and even its misleading character: if it takes you to the threshold of spiritual life, it in no way constitutes it. Hence the wish to go one step further. I had already tried several times, in French, which is natural since it is the language in which I was educated. I wrote a few things but they didn't sound good, even to me. So I left it. After living here for a time and now more immersed in the music of the language I said to myself, "Come on, why not try in Catalan?". I started writing a number of different things, even though it was difficult and it's still difficult for me to write in Catalan, for I'm not a spontaneous writer and have to keep rewriting because of my scant mastery of the language. And then when I had several pieces written, I could say about some, "I'm not ashamed of that". Then I started to use some bits of something much longer I'd done and that had spread out in many directions, and I kept honing and honing until this book came out of it.

I, who have studied economics, am totally convinced that in order to understand properly how a country functions you have to read its literature. [...] The memory I had of this country was a partial and very fragmented one, and I had to read books on its history to get back into it, to rediscover it. But I've always been chary of history. However objective history might aspire to be, it's always written from the standpoint of the stories of the great military men, politicians, statesmen, all those people who believe they make it. I especially mistrust those people who seek arguments in history and those who claim to have discovered its sense. I think history has no sense. Any notion that presumes to have found sense in that quarter has only led to dire experiments. For someone of my generation, it's quite natural to have misgivings about these people.

"Absence is always a source of inspiration." I've always thought that these words of Mallarmé constitute one of the keys of literary expression. As in Kafka's case. What is absent is what has power in the story. In all of Kafka's literature, there is only one plot. So, in the end, there is none because it's always the same. Against plot, against history, I believe the evocative power of language is what can, starting from the diverse and contradictory elements of reality, reconstruct a reality that can be believed. Proust said it, in the famous line that I always keep in mind: "La vraie vie, la vie réellement vécue, c'est la literature" [True life, life really lived, is literature]. Of course, these are all literary ideas and it's quite another thing to set about writing. In fact I'm not a writer but a person who started to write, but without writing full-time or earning a living from it. I've wanted to write, I love writing, but from that to being a writer...

I started to read Catalan literature after a certain age. This is not the case with French or American literature, which I read as an adolescent. In my adolescence, literary Catalan does not figure much, apart from Verdaguer and Carner, whom we recited at home. Then, at about sixteen or seventeen, I read Pla and some things by Gaziel and Sagarra, because Sagarra was writing for Mirador. But this is not really entering into a particular literature. The truth is that, even adding the subsequent years, I haven't read a lot of literature in Catalan. Solitud, for example, I must have read when I'd already turned forty. Most of what I've read has been in French and English or in translations to French. But it was a huge surprise to read Plato in Catalan. It was a real discovery. I felt at home. This wasn't so much the case when I read The Odyssey as I found Riba's translation a mite affected but, in any case, it was infinitely superior to the famous French version of Victor Bérard! What a delight it was to read Plato and Virgil in the Bernat Metge editions. Catalan has the virtue of not being a crystallised language, but it is more rooted in the everyday, not so much a laboratory product.

Not long ago I discovered the Bible which, from the literary point of view, is really a masterpiece, vastly better than The Odyssey. I refer to the Old Testament, which I've read in the Montserrat translation. Magnificent! What a joy! Yet, in French... It turns out that all the archaic languages sound better to me in Catalan. So much so that even I'm surprised. One's relationship with language is a very strange thing.

For some years now, I've been trying to read what's being published in Catalan. I'm interested to know what's being done but maybe I've reached this point a bit late. There is one thing that disturbs my perception of what's coming out in Catalan. When somebody writes a book, even if it's a first book, it needs to have come through the literature. He or she can try to do something different but can't do without what's already there behind. I don't believe spontaneous talent exists, though at times the odd case appears, like this Houellebecq who's supposed to be brilliant but he hasn't come through anything and you don't rediscover anything there. As for what's being published in Catalan, I don't know what it's come through because I don't know Catalan literature well enough.

[...] There are always some writers you like more than others, but I still haven't found any that would become my favourite. The same thing happens with French literature. A friend of mine who was an editor at Grasset said that Proust was "le fossoyeur du roman", the gravedigger of the novel. It's true that the classical model, after Kafka, Joyce and Proust, is in crisis. Moreover, the novel is now faced with formidable competition, by which I mean cinema and television. Literature continues to exist but everywhere it's heading along other paths. For example, what is this that Magris writes? Is it history, novel, memoirs? What is it?

Fragments of an interview by Josep M. Muñoz, published in L'Avenç, N. 327 (September 2007).