Who I Am and Why I Write

My paternal grandfather, whom I didn’t know because he died a month before I was born, was a carpenter. He made very high quality furniture with wonderful moulding and forms. Sometimes his work was more sober and other times it was more ornate but it always had the hallmark of his elegance. During the Civil War he saved people. They lived in the centre of the city and he knew it well, so during the bombing attacks he guided people to places where there were underground shelters.

Palma, 1966. Philologist and writer

There was one just in front of his house, in plaça des Banc de s’Oli. Once he lost one of his three children in a fleeing, panic-stricken crowd. Later on, he did his best to raise them and educate them and, finally, when he was still young, he died of a heart attack on the Mallorca football field. My grandfather, whom I never knew because I didn’t arrive in time, was somebody who did important things.

I could tell other stories about my family, or our neighbours and acquaintances. All lives deserve to be recounted. Everyone should be able to say who she is and why she does what she does. There’s nothing special about writing. My grandfather joined perfectly cut pieces of wood to make display cases or chairs or tables. I join words to make stories or to express my thoughts. That is all I do. I don’t know whether this gives me the right to appear in some dictionary. I started writing almost as a game. I’ve always liked games more than anything else. And that’s why the game still continues. Yes, that’s why: if I play, I play with all my senses, with my very best efforts. It is not only to while away the time. There are players who can earn a living with card games; I’ve never managed to do that with my stories. There are players who fall ill if they don’t play but I don’t get a fever if I leave it. I’m able to shoo away temptation (and even if the nagging doesn’t lessen, I put up with it as one puts up with those chronic ailments that you take no notice of as you get older). As for players who adore the game, I didn’t fall in love easily when I was young and I know how to keep my love for certain things. Sometimes words have taken me to seventh heaven. But I sincerely believe that this is nothing compared with holding out your hand to people and guiding them to a shelter so they won’t be blown up. Life, which is unjust, looks after those who tell things instead of those who make things. But – and here, perhaps, it grants us a little bit of justice – it also makes sure that we can’t escape telling them. Thus we live. Soberly or ornately. It doesn’t matter. That is how we live.


It’s said...

In her writing – tidy, simple, accessible yet also intense – the autobiographical component plays a major and even decisive role. Instead of following the example of Hamlet and holding up a mirror to nature to see what is reflected in it, Canyelles, whether she means to or not, has remained true to her nature – “I only live in an inner exile” (p. 127) – and has used the mirror to reflect her own, barely camouflaged image: “I had managed to remain hidden behind the computer screen” (p. 104).

People have often said that, one way or another, most writers tend to write the same book, over and over again. Canyelles goes one step further and, consciously or unconsciously – “What masks of the ego are in my stories?” (p. 173) – repeatedly writes the same book with the same character. Fortunately, she manages to transcend herself through literature and to transform what should have been strictly individual into a general phenomenon, the pattern of the (harsh) lives of an entire generation of women: “we wonder yet again why we have doggedly persisted in doing something so useless, all the years of our existence” (p. 67).

(...)

This is so much the case that whereas, in normal conditions, worthwhile literary works hint they should have (at least) a second reading, this one not only suggests it but almost demands it: “True existence is the one that happens hidden away” (p. 25). And, more than anything else, it demands this because of its homogenous, indivisible, non-individualisable condition: each story only attains its exact and greatest value, sense and justification as part of a whole; to the extent that it is an inextricable part of a whole; of a complete whole which, for its part, also – and only – achieves its final form, its value and its proper place with the sum of each and every one of its parts or chapters.

The intermeshing of several narrative samples, distributed in seventy-nine fragments of considerably varying but always brief dimensions (between five lines and eight pages) is Canyelles’ main rhetorical principle in conferring authenticity on the story. (…) At this point, it may seem that a considerable part of the novel’s merit is to be found in the treatment of the story as a simple narrative artefact. But this is not the case: one of the book’s strong points is, without a doubt, quite an admirable balance between form and content. The fact is that if, on the one hand, formal elaboration is necessary to provide credibility, on the other hand, if one starts out from these strategies, only an intelligent choice of a pretext for the storyline (…) makes it possible to unfold this book’s intertextual exchanges based on Jean Rhys’ real-life career.

But the stories of Mai no sé què fer fora de casa (I Never Know What to Do When I’m Away from Home) go much further than that. The meta-literary subtlety is only a pretext in the service of the growth and maturation of one of the most singular, interesting (and if I may put it like this) beautifully moving voices in Catalan literature today. It is a voice we already knew from another book of stories, Els vidres nets (Clean Glass) and the excellent novels Cap d’Hornos (Cape Horn), L’alè del búfal a l’hivern (The Buffalo’s Breath in Winter) and La novel·la de Dickens (Dickens’ Novel). Neus Canyelles does not limit herself to giving her version of the original stories she starts out from. Rather, one might say she vampirises them, brings them to her own terrain, choosing them in keeping with her own interests, and removing them from the world of each of their authors to install them with great precision and enviable stylistic and narrative skill in her own world. To give one of the more extreme examples, according to Canyelles, Bukowski is no longer Bukowski: he is Canyelles. And Neus Canyelles is a magnificent writer who, book after book, keeps constructing an riveting portrait of the perplexity and bewilderment of a person of a very singular sensibility who is faced with a particularly aggressive, absurd world, one which is dismissive of feelings and most especially love. Literature is only the watchtower from which the spectacle is contemplated. And all the rest is life, filtered through writing that makes one want to applaud at the end of each story.

The nameless narrator, the main character of these sixteen stories, recalls sixteen personal experiences that take her back to sixteen moments of universal literature. This is not at all surprising: literature can resemble life, or life can resemble literature because, at the heart of both, resides the problem of relationships with others. Canyelles, however, does not ironically re-create or parody a single one of the texts from which she builds her stories: she merely mentions them to satisfy curious readers as to their origins. Then, anyone wishing to know the scope of her manoeuvres will realise that neither does she have any intention of rendering homage to the style or tone of such greatly differing and hard-to-reconcile authors such as Nabokov and Bukowski, or Carver and Anderson. Her tribute simply consists in adapting the situations of their storylines to the experiences the character recounts.

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