Sebastià Alzamora’s Injection of New Blood

This gothic thriller begins with the confession of a very lucid, philosophical man, who is well versed in theology and claims to be a vampire. He vividly describes how he killed a priest and a young boy. The setting is Barcelona in 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, a time when priests and other religious figures were being killed left and right, as churches were burned and convents looted by anticlerical anarchists, not by evil immortal beings.

“Crim de sang [Crime of Blood] is a mature and surprising work; an erudite exploration that maintains the narrative flow.”

Ara.cat

“Utterly delicious and charming. Miracolo a Maiorca [Miracle in Llucmajor] is just that: a comedy that leaves you smiling.”

Blow Up

“Miracolo a Maiorca is a delicate romantic comedy with playful but intense erotic strokes; it is a modern fable directed to adults, with subtle and intelligent irony.”

Magazine.com

While police detective Gregori Muñoz investigates the murders, a community of Capuchin nuns are held hostage inside their convent along with the Bishop of Barcelona-who has supposedly been executed-and a judge and a forensic doctor are creating their own sort of monster. Despite the numerous manifestations of the human capacity for evil, a young novice gives Muñoz the strength to believe that it can be fought. The surprise ending shows that the monsters may not be as bad as the humans after all, and that life wins out over evil. Set in an intriguing historical period and written in rich, layered prose, this novel confronts major issues while maintaining the fast pace of a whodunit.

Sebastià Alzamora (Llucmajor, Mallorca 1972) writes both poetry and prose. He is the winner of numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Josep Pla Award in 2005. Crim de sang, his most recent novel, was awarded the 2011 Sant Jordi Prize.

First of all, the author wishes to declare

that the fact of handing in this book to the printer constitutes an act of capitulation. The production of what I now have on offer for you (life is commerce) under the title of Apoteosi del cercle (Apotheosis of the Circle) has been, alas, a lengthy, complicated and chancy (diverting too) process and it has enabled me to understand that, in its process and consummation, writing contains thought and contains it categorically: the labours of those who have striven to empty the strict word of this intellective charge that it bears in essence must, without a doubt, have been titanic. I mean to say that in the process of writing the book I came to understand what I was writing, which doesn’t mean that writing is necessarily prone to sense (I’ll come back to this) though it is to concept. The phenomenon of writing is inevitably filled with conceptual content as it comes about. We could say that this is so because all writing is always connoted, and I suppose that would be uttering a glaring truth. (...)

Just before I set out to write this book, I’d published another one. It was called Rafel and it was the first finished item that I was offering to what we Catalan poets, in our delirium of grandeur, call the reading public. This, my first publication, which one must see as the culminating point of the aspirations of any young poet from the provinces (because there’s nothing younger, nor of the provinces, I can assure you, than a verse-writing twenty-two-year-old from Llucmajor), had helped, more than anything else, to fill me with angst and headaches. However much I looked at it and looked at it again, I was unable to explain to myself where I’d wanted to end up with that book. I was trying to contrast what I’d written there with what is called the general panorama of Catalan poetry of our times and there was no way I could make it work. I wasn’t attracted or interested by the possibility of plagiarising, absorbing or imitating the styles of Carner, Foix or Brossa. Neither was I remotely concerned to spit on the name of Salvador Espriu. Poor me, I’d been born too late to belong to the wonderfully joyful generation of the seventies. The anthologies (in fact always the same, one and only anthology) paraded by, right in front of me, without any of them being able to, or wanting to include me, thank heavens. I didn’t even have the indispensable cash or cheek to become the typical secondary school maudit complete with black waistcoat and top hat, or a summer full of ticks and self-glorification. Intensely, humbly, I admired Foix, Riba, Rosselló-Pòrcel, Blai Bonet, Vinyoli, Ferrater, and Gimferrer. I venerated Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Rilke, Mallarmé, Cendrars, Vallejo, Lezama Lima, Homer, and Dante. And, moreover, I’m Mallorcan, I told myself. What the hell am I going to do with all that? I felt good and confused and good and wretched.

Soon, however, a host of charitable and extremely clever souls, of diverse generational and geographical provenance (pre- and post-avant-garde, lyrical and anti-lyrical, confessional and moralists, critics of all kinds, solvency and semblance: great is Catalonia) dragged me out of the miserable little pit of my doubts: it seems from what issues from the lips of those wise people, who always spoke ex cathedra, in general, and through the big spout like the oracles, I, because of age and percentage of decasyllables, was, am, have to be a neo-classicist, a nice way of labelling all the country’s limp young pseudo-Noucentist [Noucentisme was an early twentieth-century Catalan politico-cultural movement in the service of bourgeois reformism (translator)] poets languishing among callow verses, waiting for the day when they’ll finally be able to dangle a tie and shine their bums behind the design table of some official or officious office. (...)

I’d written a book of poetry in keeping with a compositional scheme of strict seriation. And I must have done that for some reason. A reason that, for me at least, was appearing evermore clearly. With all my ingenuity and weakness, what I’d tried to do was to lay bare the speciousness of that comfortable old dichotomy that opposes form and content. A denouncement that, all distances aside, Valéry had already published with his La Jeune Parque, and Lezama Lima with the totality of his poetic work. Like any other literary work, Rafel, constituted discourse that had crystallised into text, and what I’d set out to do (perhaps without fully realising it at first) was to demonstrate that the structure in which this text had been given its definitive form was an equally essential part as its words, its silences, and the conventional signs and concepts that – also – comprised it. That a structure, beyond being a mere formal receptacle within which a linguistic and conceptual system is fitted, is also system and text and, transcending text, discourse. That the notion of structure, in a literary text, is basically tied to the entity and aesthetic identity of the text because it contributes to it a decisive charge of what – as I was to discover in time – Jacques Derrida called “force and signification”.

Hence, now yes, thanks to seeking an explanation from my own poems, I’d got my first answer. It didn’t take me long to get the second one: in my book it was possible to observe a clear concern for sense. I’ve already said at the start that sense is not inherent in writing, or in what this phenomenon has either in process or as an accomplished fact. But, yes, it’s possible and licit to orientate writing to a quest for sense because the need for sense arises as a consequence of a desire for beauty. Writing that is loaded purely with concept will head rapidly towards nihilism unless it is balanced with an extreme dose of irony and, as far as I’m concerned, while these two options might have a certain morbid appeal, they’re not satisfactory. I’d therefore been inclined (at first instinctively and, by then, consciously) towards the option of constructing sense by means of my poems. An option that was born, as I said, from a desire for beauty, which means the desire to do and become: the desire to escape from nothingness, the desire to be. In this case, to be by means of writing, to be for and in the word: to save oneself in the word, as Carles Riba said, and as Vicenç Llorca has so opportunely recalled when referring to Miquel Àngel Riera. (...)

Llorca has researched and very cannily explored this line of writing to which I refer, and he has rightly dubbed it “pact poetry”: the pact between contemplation and knowledge, between sense and word, between the work and being. And he has spoken of this in his essay L’entusiasme reflexiu (Reflective Enthusiasm) in the following terms, “At the end of the day, it’s finding legitimacy, and the need to speak opens up the possibility of being at this meeting point that poetry shapes between the reality that man creates and the essence of the world he inhabits.” I wanted to cite these words to affirm that they completely and exactly link up with what I wanted to say with this digression on writing and sense. Hence, I subscribe to them and completely abide by them because the search for sense in writing consists, in effect, in the violence that is applied to the word to make it produce more reality, so that it creates not another life but this: more life.

Sebastià Alzamora. Prologue to Apoteosi del cercle (Edicions 62, 1997)