A World That Has Lost Its Nobility

Julià Guillamon

Journalism, diaries, poetry, stories and the novel – five genres which Valentí Puig (Palma de Mallorca, 1949) has been working with since the end of the 1970s – all come together in La vida és estranya (Life Is Strange), the story of an aristocrat from Conca de Corema, a hinterland region an hour and a half from Barcelona, which he both loves and hates. Observations of reality, quotes from history books, as in the diaries. Episodes with prostitutes, a woman who touches her leg with a magic gesture, as in the poems. Condemnation of hamburger joints and the Golden Mile of top-brand boutiques, as in the opinion pieces. Stories about the patrol, his gang of childhood friends who set out to be the bad boys of the town, and about the old fogies, their victims with whom they now share tables and glasses of vermouth, as in the stories. An initiation, a family portrait, attestation of a historic failure and endless decadence, as in the novels. La vida és estranya is a synthesis of Valentí Puig’s work and his way of seeing the world.

For Oleguer de Regós, nobility is a superior form of freedom. But now it has vanished from the face of the earth and he can find no solid base from which to spread his wings and fly. He takes refuge in his studies. By way of analysing his own microcosm he hopes to come to understand and establish the laws of history. This intellectual subterfuge must allow him to allay the consequences of the great fall and incapacity to adapt to the times. The figure of the aristocrat functions, of course, as a projection of the intellectual who is increasingly isolated and misunderstood. His personal crisis is reflected in Catalan life as a whole. The mentality of Oleguer the historian leaps from one century to another, from the Quaternary Era to the Carlist Wars or the Iberian Anarchist Federation, to end up sketching ordinary people and a present with no prospects in sight. The real, unbridled, violent life of the days of the great overlords has given way to appearances and double standards. The figure of Bafàs, patron, swindler, victim of the real estate bubble and illegal funder of political parties is a magnified mirror of the country’s vices.

Valentí Puig is a master of pithy, biting writing with plenty of pyrotechnics (for example when he says that people are for Barça or for Woody Allen, or notes that priests have exchanged the cassock and tonsured heads for Samsonite suitcases and encrypted numbers of Cayman Islands bank accounts). He drags the reader into a whirlwind of activity when he portrays the grandfather who returns to take over the property after the death of Oleguer’s father. He describes the crushing daily routine of senyor Rossend, a neighbour of good faith with whom Oleguer goes to the square in front of the cathedral where people are dancing Sardanas for Independence. Through his sporadic relationship with his friend Julien and coexistence with Glòria, his sometime wife, the reader experiences passion, contradiction and the abyss of nothingness. Julien is a very appealing fictional character who offsets Oleguer’s apathetic and somewhat withered selfishness.

Somewhere between criticism, satire, evocation of lost time, failure of the present, desire for freedom and an always uncomfortable intellectual and vital derealisation, La vida és estranya is the work of a writer who finds no reason for belief. If in La gran rutina (The Great Routine, 2007) Puig unmasks the progressive Catalan bourgeoisie and, in Barcelona cau (Barcelona Falls, 2012), he leaves both victims and winners of the war without excuses, in this book he describes village and city, aristocrats and upstarts, intellectuals and airheads, notaries and tenant farmers, generals and digital politicians, in a portrait without heroes or models, submitted to the last law of history: everything is in vertiginous decline and the only consolation is a glass of white wine.

Julià Guillamon. La Vanguardia. Culturas, 3 December 2014

Puig or Narrative Energy

Outstanding among the best novels of 2014 is Valentí Puig’s La vida és estranya (Life Is Strange). It might be described as Puig’s own false memoirs, as was the case with Salvador Orlan’s book about Llorenç Villalonga, but this latter work has incomprehensibly fallen into oblivion and we’d do better now to consider Puig’s book in a different light. Let’s say that Puig has pulled out of his sleeve a character which apparently – at least in terms of the accidents of outward existence – bears no relation with him and yet functions extraordinarily well as a mask through which to convey a certain view of the world and, more specifically, our times, country and capital. “I suspect that Barcelona will eventually destroy Catalonia.” This is the leitmotif which brilliantly runs through this remarkable account of a certain Catalonia, fast on the way to extinction, and its counterpoint of an increasingly globalised and depersonalised city.

Who, then, is speaking to us in La vida és estranya? What kind of voice is this, what kind of mask and what kind of character? “My name is Oleguer de Regós, the last surviving member of the Conca nobility,” he declares at the beginning of the work. However, in these opening pages, he also offers other clues to his identity, which are equally as significant as his Carlist origins, and maybe even more significant. This is a man of “inaction”, sixty years old, a “hopeless failure” and a historian who is writing his memoirs “to let people know who I am and what I have done.” So far, there’s nothing out of the ordinary or, better said, nothing to make one divine that anything out of the ordinary is about to happen.

He also says that, as a young man, he wrote Història de l’ermita de la Salvació (History of the Salvation Hermitage) and that for some years now he has been trying to fulfil his vocation as a historian. “I understood that my destiny was a book, the book that would manage to discover both thread and key of the life of centuries.” He is not short of ambition. Indeed he aims at nothing less than writing “a definitive study on the laws of history.” Yet, he offers no further details about this treatise unless it is to repeat that he spends his days in a deserted library of the Gothic Quarter, “probing the core ideas of history,” as he later says, although that’s the last we hear of it. What we do realise from the very start, however, is that the whole thing is a simple narrative device and, accordingly, Oleguer’s calling as a historian is not to be taken seriously.

Nothing in these circumstances suggests to the reader that this character will be capable of coming up with any even minimally juicy details about anything but this is precisely the undeniable tour de force achieved by Valentí Puig. The memoirs of his character – or, more specifically, the abysmal gulf between the aims of his ludicrous conceit of being a historian and the results he achieves with his fake dilettante’s reminiscences – are the essence of the book Puig offers to the reader, a work loaded with talent and exercising a strange hypnotic power from start to finish. It is truly the incontrovertible triumph of literature over history, or the victory of fiction over any kind of history.

Indeed, La vida és estranya conquers the reader with the impact and functioning of its formal magnetism: the novel as an artefact of great verbal precision, fiction as the culmination of a form that is as free as it is crafted. A form entirely consisting of verbal textures, lexical gleam, syntactic delicacy, and lively, sparkling dialogue (for example in the argument between Oleguer and his wife Glòria on the terrace of her flat in Turó Park when she lashes out, “I don’t give a damn who you are or what you do. I don’t belong to anyone. Go on, off you go and pretend to write a book you’re never going to write. Hide away in your little flat in carrer Petritxol. What do you know about life? What do you know about me, about women, about anything?”) Yet there is also descriptive meticulousness – for example, that applied to certain women – humour in abundance and, most of all, intelligence which is disarming in its absolute naturalness, and this is the hardest thing to achieve: either one has it or one does not. And I can testify that Puig has it and he makes us partake of it on every page.

Referring to his historiographical project, La vida dels segles (The Life of Centuries), Oleguer de Regós says that ever since the day he woke up with certain knowledge of what the title of his opus was going to be, “I’ve done nothing else but prepare myself to start work on it because I know that, as soon as I begin, the book will write itself.” He concludes, “It will be a lesson in energy.” And this is what it is, a lesson in narrative energy, contained in Valentí Puig’s most recent novel.

Àlex Susanna. Avui Cultura, 2 January 2015

Valentí Puig’s Barcelona

More or less the same thing happens with Valentí Puig as used to be the case with Josep Pla: he’s rarely seen as a “Barcelona genre” writer because he made his literary name with other themes and concerns. Yet, like Pla, who almost violently countered his image as an author somewhere between a man of the Empordà region and globetrotter by producing two works which are now essential for anyone who wants to understand Barcelona – I refer, of course to El quadern gris (The Gray Notebook) and a Barcelona, una discussió entranyable (Barcelona, an Intimate Discussion) – Valentí Puig has roamed the city of Barcelona in his last three novels, moving beyond his better-known facet as a diarist, memoir writer and essayist of Mallorcan origins to open up this new front.

In Barcelona cau (Barcelona Falls, 2012, which has just been published in Spanish by Pre-Textos) he dared to explore the uncharted cartography of the Fifth Column during the Civil War as well as the sinister clandestine prisons of the Military Information Service during the Second Spanish Republic. In La gran rutina (The Great Routine, 2007) and now, La vida és estranya (Life Is Strange, 2014), he explores the symbolic spaces of socioeconomic transformation, particularly that affecting the Barcelona of the elites. However, while La gran rutina is a choral work with several characters, both Barcelona cau and La vida és estranya are existential tales with just one character. In the latter work, Oleguer de Redós spends his days not far from Tinell Hall, working on a historical treatise in a library financed by a speculator. He lives in a flat in carrer Petritxol which he has inherited from a libertine grandfather (as his ex-wife has kept the flat they shared in the Turó Park neighbourhood) and likes to walk around near the plaça del Pi, after which he crosses the plaça Catalunya to head up passeig de Gràcia until he reaches avinguda Diagonal. Sometimes he meets up with a friend, a woman from Barceloneta. His memory often conjures up the Salón Rosa, an elegant teahouse – which I was also born in time to know – once occupying a place now taken over by a shopping arcade.

Works of lucid scepticism and historical lassitude, Valentí Puig’s Barcelona novels move between pining over a rich institutional and cultural legacy which he knows is defunct and the perception of a vociferous present which his most cherished characters experience as an extended threat.

Sergio Vila-Sanjuán. La Vanguardia. Culturas, 7 January 2015