In 1997 the missed Jaume Vallcorba published in Quaderns Crema ‘La gran novel·la sobre Barcelona’ by Sergi Pàmies. The city was drinking the last sips of 1992 and Pasqual Maragall had served as prodigious mayor. Twenty-five years later, with the recovery of ‘La gran novel·la sobre Barcelona’, the editor Sandra Ollo wants to make known to the new generations authors who are already classics.
Like Pàmies, who accepts the initiative like a surprise party: «That debatable genre in which the honoree says no, but leaves the door ajar to vanity… I have said yes to everything, something unusual in a biography characterized by no to everything », ironically.
As Jordi Puntí warns in the prologue to this new edition, “the book was too thin to contain a ‘great’ novel.”
The title focused on the ‘founders’ of Catalan literature who insisted in a loud voice on the need for a “great novel about Barcelona”.
Such a claim struck Pàmies as “mean and low-flying”: a false erudition that “despised a list of novelists who, both in Spanish and in Catalan (all those that can be included between Josep Maria de Sagarra and Casavella), had written great works about the city.
So he “revenged” in his own way: fifteen stories written between 1997 and the first months of 1997 with that misleading title. From then on, when the Barcelona novels were recounted, ‘La gran novel·la sobre Barcelona’ by Pàmies came out… With the tagline that it was not a novel.
These stories that converge in the loss of a manuscript –the myth of the ‘great novel’– in a taxi and its location in the Lost Property Office retain their acid freshness. “Authors age faster than books,” says Pámies, who extirpates nostalgia when he collects vivid moments.
“In the 1990s you could do anything. There was a creative prosperity that tolerated it because the dogmas were at their worst. It was Postmodernity, they said, that I never understood, although I pretended to understand it while I waited for it to pass soon».
That thirtysomething writer had published three novels and was the father of twins, a situation that pushed him to short fiction. “Stories offered me the ideal conditions of unpredictability, promiscuity, intermittence and successive and fleeting passions,” he explains. He didn’t write as much in the newspapers as he does now: “Some stories would be chronicles that I didn’t publish.”
If the chronicle is the richest genre of journalistic writing as it can be nourished with fictional materials, the reverse also happens: what is told in the story is real. Pàmies gives examples of a dinner with Paul Auster that seems like a story; or a trip with Manuel Vázquez Montalbán to Québec to participate in the 1991 Book Fair.
After three decades, – “I am a slow-gestating animal,” he jokes – it becomes a story that marries the tale and the chronicle. The pandemic has not been an inspiring situation for him: «I started a novel that I did not like at all… These times call for more imagination than autobiography…». (He has already written three stories, everything will come).
