It's said...

Melcior Comes (Sa Pobla, Mallorca, 1980) published his first novel when he was twenty-four. Since then, he has received prestigious literary awards and, in his professional life, is working as a teacher at the Barcelona Athenaeum School of Writing. Over the years he has read, thought, and published half a dozen novels. Sobre la terra impura (On Impure Ground) is the work of a mature writer, a step forward that should make it possible to leave behind the unfortunate label of “young author” and to be treated, at last, as a fully-fledged novelist.

Vicenç Pagès Jordà. 'Sobre la terra impura: el Foster Kane de l'espardenya', El Periódico (16/10/2018).

He’s said...

David Lodge speaks of four paths in contemporary literature: magic realism, social realism, metaliterature, and autofiction. In my last novel, Sobre la terra impura (On Impure Ground), I tried to include all four aspects. The result is an altered metaphorical realism without ceasing to be a prism making it possible to understand reality in the same way as a journalistic report does. Some authors focus more on the artefact of language and narrative structure. With my novels, it is also possible to speak of metaliterature because there is a narrator who is very like me and I don’t hide from the reader the fact that the book is a literary artefact constructed in the telling of the story. However, the realist thread explains everything in detail and the author is hidden. I think that literary prose is democratic and not hermetic, and the writers you’re most familiar with, from Balzac to Philip Roth, take the floor and you understand what they’re saying. We need to go beyond realism because we’re in the twenty-first century and must devise new kinds of playing and seeking a purely literary truth. I like playing with forms and structure but, most of all, I want everyone to be able to empathise and to make myself understood.

Valèria Gaillard. 'Realisme vs. fabulació', Ara Llegim (22/06/2019).