It’s said...

Joan Jordi Miralles is a writer who is hard to see. So much so that the prizes he wins are more numerous than the interviews he gives, which makes one suspect, first, that he works very hard while, finally, it confirms that the fruits of his literary exercise do not go unharvested. Here are a few facts: 2005 Andròmina Prize for L’Altíssim (Excellency); 2009 Vila de Lloseta Prize for L’úter de la balena (The Uterus of the Whale); 2012 Pare Colom Mediterranean Theatre Prize per Això no és Àustria (This Is Not Austria); 2017 Marian Vayreda Prize for La intimitat de les bèsties (The Intimacy of Beasts). In 2018, the Joanot Martorell Prize for Aglutinació (Agglutination). Moreover, Una dona meravellosa (2014 – A Marvellous Woman) and Els nens feliços (2016 – Happy Children) complete a solid, now consolidated career which dawned with granitic, giddying prose.

Ponç Puigdevall, winner of the previous Joanot Martorell prize, says that, “for Miralles, the reader is also guilty and the only deal possible with him is to shake him up mercilessly, open his eyes, and restore to him his lost intelligence.” Aglutinació is precisely this and, moreover, it is written in second person, which means that you, reader, know from the very first paragraph that the narrator is speaking directly to you, scrutinising, quizzing, absorbing you into the story as if you yourself were the main character because you wonder about the limits of immoderation and perdition through a London pilgrimage which is as decadent and darkened as Goya’s version of the San Isidro pilgrimage. The only difference is that, in this evasive pilgrimage, solitude in collectiveness is imposed in an excessive, frenetic city fed up with giving refuge to nihilists like you.

Aglutinació is a story written in vibrant, robust language, shamelessly secure and without sharp edges, with a layer of black humour that highlights the lustre of the fringes of society where a chaotic band of weird, crazy characters regale us with well-administered doses of dialogue, and bubbly, often funny scenes (of hoarse laughter and toothless gums) in a wild yet stagnant atmosphere. There is no lack of shocks and intensity. This is the genesis of contrast: defenceless people who, counterbalancing this condition, live life to the fullest. Hence, labelled as runaways, they are meticulously hilarious.

Francesc Ginabreda. ‘El fatalisme londinenc de Joan Jordi Miralles’ (The London Fatalism of Joan Jordi Miralles), Núvol(25 January 2018) [fragment]

The seven long stories comprising La intimitat de les bèsties (The Intimacy of Beasts – Empúries, 2017) are written as if the author has filmed what he is relating: with a cold distant, yet intense, penetrating gaze, seeking the power and meaning of scenes in external actions rather than in the labyrinths of the morality and psychology of the characters, a viewpoint which, in general, is expressed in refined, direct, accelerated, cutting prose of angular, almost aggressive consistency, which only occasionally unhitches itself from strict literalness to enter the realms of the symbolic dimension.

Although it is evident that the prose in these stories has been highly polished to make it flowing, spirited, and transparent, Joan Jordi Miralles is not a superficially formalist writer who stakes everything on style. He is more like the opposite. One of his merits is that just a few of his paragraphs are enough to make us understand that, from standpoint of the human experience we all share, it is worth paying attention to every one of the stories he sets about telling us.

Pere Antoni Pons. ‘Bèsties tan humanes’ (Such Human Beasts), Ara Llegim (18 March 2017) [fragment]

Una dona meravellosa (A Marvellous Woman) by Joan Jordi Miralles, does a balancing act between thematic extremism and a coldly distant narrator, while gathering in the best of both fictional options, namely the hysterical and the sceptical. The novel takes off at great speed: in a couple of pages more than a decade in the life of the nurse Neus is over and done with. Miralles is keen to get to the year his main character turns forty, which is when her life starts to change. Separating from her husband is the first downhill run on the rollercoaster. The second is sexual experimentation which soon descends into considerable depths of degradation, as for example in the chapter featuring the tub of ice cream and the lonely dog. Miralles describes a life that is getting more and more sordid but does not revel in it. The personal excesses and professional discipline—Neus works in the Bellvitge Hospital—are alternated with perfect balance, until they start infecting each other. Her burnout, diagnosed by a workmate, is the first step downwards Neus unwaveringly takes. The perfect pace of Una dona meravellosa practically obliges one to devour the novel in two or three readings, which means that one advances full speed to the question that resonates throughout the second half of the book. Is it worth staying alive when everyday existence means constant torture?

Miralles has achieved a well-rounded, intense book, set in a marginal, uncomfortable present, where not even trains or roads are safe, where the price of not “biting your tongue” and delving deep into things is very high, almost deadly. He manages this without artifice or rhetorical acrobatics, and with appropriate stylistic fury.

Jordi Nopca. ‘Una infermera memorable’ (A Memorable Nurse), Ara Llegim (10 May 2014) [fragment]