Catalan Narrative 1875–2015 ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati

Abstract

Reviewed by: Catalan Narrative 1875–2015 ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati David George Catalan Narrative 1875–2015. Ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati. Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. xiii+278 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–781887–10–3. This fascinating collection of articles on a wide variety of Catalan writers emerged from a two-day conference held at the University of St Andrews in 2015. Some are comparative studies. Enric Bou's, for instance, subtly and convincingly compares quite distinct writers from different eras. His highlighting of seemingly insignificant details in the chosen texts illuminates these in an original fashion. Josep Murgades offers an evaluation of noucentista prose writers and excoriates critics who have suggested that narrative is virtually absent from noucentisme. Montserrat Lunati examines the presence of Maria-Mercè Marçal and another female writer, Mercè Rodoreda, in the work of a third, Mercè Ibarz. Other contributors consider the work of single authors. Elisa Martí-Lopez demonstrates how Narcís Oller's La febre d'or exposes the emptiness of the unstable surface sheen produced by speculative money during the period of Barcelona's stock market boom of the early 1880s. Helena Buffery's article contains detailed and highly pertinent readings of primary archival sources in her analysis of Maria-Mercè Marçal. A number of studies set Catalan writers within a broader European cultural framework, be it literary or philosophical. Schopenhauer's pessimism is the basis of Jordi Larios's fresh interpretation of Caterina Albert's seminal novel Solitud. Dominic Keown probes such questions as the fraught and shifting relationship between colonizer and colonized, the complex role of literature in portraying sociopolitical issues, and the dialectic conducted by his chosen author, Albert Sánchez Piñol, with mainstream European writing. Using as his point of departure a 1938 essay by Albert Camus and drawing on philosophical texts from ancient Greece to Heidegger, Joan Ramon Resina analyses texts by five Catalan poets and prose writers. Sílvia Mas i Sañé sheds light on a complex novel by Avel·li Artís-Gener through an analysis of its links to existentialism and the nouveau roman. A second study of Artís-Gener by Rhiannon McGlade employs various aspects of humour theory, while making a strong case for the importance of the fiction of a figure who is best known for his writing and cartoons in the popular press. Approaches to history figure strongly in this volume. Kathryn Crameri explores how the family, on both a personal and, more specifically, a national level, emerges from novels about the 1714 defeat of the Catalans by the Bourbons. P. Louise John-son's intriguingly titled article ('Oedipus and the Spanish Crown') is a study of two [End Page 514] novels by Guillem Viladot about historical Castilian figures. Through a discussion of simultaneity and the fluidity of narrative time, Mario Santana examines how Jaume Cabré presents moral responsibility, guilt, redemption and the way in which 'the crimes of history cannot be written out of the record' (p. 252) in his novel Jo confesso. Language is the focus of two articles. Jordi Cornellà-Detrell's is a shrewd analysis of multilingualism in three novels, highlighting different motives for and results of heteroglossia, which he locates within the changing nature of sociolinguistics in Catalonia, both south and north of the Franco-Spanish border. Alan Yates explains how 'literary translation has been [. . .] the most satisfying if not the most remunerative facet of my professional activity, the ideal complement to linguistic and literary studies' (p. 261). This, he writes, is the context of his own translation of Raimon Casellas's Els sots feréstecs, a complex, ground-breaking novel that has fascinated him since he first read it more than half a century ago. Two attractive features of the volume are its richness and the way it brings to life the wide variety of works analysed. Critical theory figures strongly in a number of the articles, but it is employed carefully and sometimes subtly as a framework that enhances rather than obscures the narrative texts under discussion. Finally, the editors' succinct Introduction intelligently, clearly, and deftly ties together the diverse strands of the...