Catalan Literature: From the 20th Century to the Present
Llorenç Villalonga
Llorenç Villalonga was born in Palma de Mallorca in 1897. A physician and psychiatrist, he was drawn to journalism, drama, short fiction, and novels. In the novel Death Lady (1931), he gave a satirical portrait of Mallorcan society in the 1920s. Bearn or The Room of the Wrists takes the form of a long letter to his ecclesiastical friend Joan Mayol. If Death Lady is the agonizing satire of a society, Bearn is the elegy for its disappearance.
Mercè Rodoreda
Mercè Rodoreda was born in Sant Gervasi de Cassoles (Barcelona) in 1908. The years of the Republic were a time of personal liberation for Rodoreda, who devoted herself to political journalism, short stories, and novels. In 1939, she went into exile in various French cities before settling in Geneva, Switzerland. In the 1970s, she returned to Catalonia, where she died in 1983 after receiving numerous awards and acclaim.
The Work
Apart from her journalistic and poetic work, Rodoreda’s output mainly comprises short stories and novels. After the war, her most important novel was Aloma, an autobiographical work published in 1938 and reconstructed thirty years later. It presents a female character in whom Rodoreda poured some of her own experiences, exploring themes of lost happiness and the transition into adulthood. Her psychological novels include La Plaça del Diamant, whose protagonist, Natalia, is nicknamed Colometa by her husband, Quimet. Their marriage represents a paradise lost forever in adolescence, and they do not regain any semblance of balance until years later.
With Quanta, guerra… and Death and So Much Spring, she moved away from the psychological component to develop the symbolic component already present in her early works.
When the difficulties of exile prevented her from consistently writing novels, she wrote short story collections such as Twenty-Two Stories.
Her prose, under the guise of the protagonists’ colloquial monologues, contains elements of high poetic value.
Josep Maria Espinàs
Josep Maria Espinàs was born in Barcelona in 1927. He has written news articles, essays, and fiction. As a journalist, his outstanding contributions to the daily press began in 1976, first in the newspaper Avui and later, in Catalan, in El País. Some of his most celebrated books of ideas have been Learning to Live Together: Reflections on Civility and Your Name is Olga, a collection of letters to his daughter with Down syndrome, which reflects on the contribution of disabled people to society and family life. His travelogues, On Foot, have achieved great popularity.
Espinàs dedicated himself to narrative writing in the 1950s, with novels such as Knives or Flames and short story collections such as Dressing to Die. These are works in which the testimonial and realistic element predominates. The reality of the war is portrayed through depersonalized characters and from an objective and markedly skeptical standpoint.
Baltasar Porcel
Baltasar Porcel was born in Andratx, Mallorca, in 1937 and made his mark on the Catalan literary world in the 1960s. He devoted himself to journalism, essays, drama, and narrative. His journalistic work includes reports, interviews, and columns in Sierra d’Or, Destino, and La Vanguardia. His essays are collected in books with titles such as Catalan Debate.
Porcel’s stage work, which can be categorized as historical realism, emerged in the 1960s, both in terms of dramatic and narrative production. Solnegre stands out, reflecting the rural and coastal life of Mallorca.
The development of Porcel’s narrative led to an evolution from these more realistic approaches to more complex formulations in which mythical and ideological components gained ground. This evolution can be seen in Horses in the Dark.
Pere Calders
Pere Calders was born in Barcelona in 1912. He enlisted as a cartographer in the Republican volunteer army, and in 1939, he was forced into exile in France and Mexico, where he lived for 23 years. From there, he collaborated in the literary circles of exile and maintained constant contact with Catalonia until 1978, with the premiere of ‘Antaviana. Calders died in 1994.
The Work
Calders excelled as a narrator and short-story writer. He published collections of war chronicles such as Units de xoc. These works contain the hallmarks of Calders’ work: the prioritization of fiction over storytelling, the superiority of narration and the vision of reality beyond reality itself, and a sense of humanistic background.
The Mexican environment forms the basis of the short story collection People of the Valley and the short novel Here Lies Nevares, which portrays the psychology of the Mexican Indian as perceived by a Westerner. In the novel The Shadow of the Agave, Calders testifies to the profound difficulties of adaptation affecting the exiled, aligning with the realistic approaches of the 1960s.
Manuel de Pedrolo
Manuel de Pedrolo was born in L’Aranyó in 1918. A Catalan nationalist and leftist, he fought on the Republican side in the war. After the war, he worked in publishing as an editor, proofreader, translator, and literary director of the collection La cua de palla, dedicated to thrillers and noir.
From the 1970s onwards, Pedrolo’s novels enjoyed remarkable popular success. Until his death in 1990, Pedrolo was highly critical of the shortcomings of the democratic political regime that emerged from the Spanish transition.
The Work
Genre is central to Pedrolo’s novelistic production, allowing him to experiment widely with subjects and narrative techniques. He examines the gap between promises and reality, denouncing situations of injustice and deprivation of liberty. The most original feature of his novels is the development of various narrative approaches to capture the psychological and social reality of his characters in its entirety.
One of his most ambitious attempts at this experimentation is the Open Time series, eleven novels built from the consequences of the same triggering event.
He also cultivated genres such as crime fiction (Dirty Tricks, 1965) and science fiction (Simultaneous Event, 1980).
The Narrative of the Seventies
The contributions of this generation are the renovation and a new thematic approach when focusing events and cultural society and the national question in Catalonia. This generation was a relief in the literary world and strengthening the momentum of Catalan literature that had occurred during the sixties and another example of the failure of the attempted genocide of the cultural and linguistic status starring Franco . As narrators include: Terence Moix, Montserrat Roig and Carme Riera. The publication of the novel The day that Marilyn died (1969), Terence de Moix, is considered the starting point of this new era.
The narrative from the eighties
The recovery of self-government and the Government have led to important initiatives promoting and strengthening the literary world:
Resumption of the Institute of Catalan Letters.
Establishment of a national awards Catalan literature.
Dissemination of the authors in the country and abroad.
Commissioning scripts for the new public media in Catalan.
Creation of the National Theater.
Promotion of studies on our literary tradition and critical editions.
Catalan courses for adults and Catalanising formal education.
The educated literary production in the Catalan language is re-placed, as in the decade of the thirties, under the sign of normality. Please note the added difficulties posed by the nature of a small reading public at large against the Catalan world languages, and also the crisis of literature in the new society of information technology.
The storytellers are most important: Quim Monzó Isabel Clara-Simon and James Carpenter.