Last year, stories and narratives reached its twenty-seventh edition. If you look at the record, the winners, in general, or are debutants, or are more at the beginning than in the middle or at the end of the respective careers. It is a prize, then, that it does not consolidate, but rather, it opens a door, gives a push, helps those benefited to believe it-and this is very important.
(1979) has won the last edition of Rodoreda with a collection entitled Elephantspublished in Empúries. The author has a degree in Humanities, has a foreign master’s degree in comparative literature and has been leading the opinion section of the Ara newspaper for more than a decade. Perhaps it is because of the intellectual and labor trajectory that the collection is worked on, it is noticeable that they have been evaluated in the four corners. If we had to make a printed t -shirt, I would say: “The author processes enriched realism of”.
The elephant in the room is an image to explain a common situation, that is, when there is an obvious problem within the group-from the couple to the whole world, he does so much-and no one wants to talk about it, to recognize the truth; It is a cousin image of the emperor’s dress. Toni Güell uses the Metaphor Proboscidic in the first tale, ‘The hot water’, the story about the fall of the horse – another image – of a half -world gas station owner. From here, in each story, it will appear, the elephant in the room, sometimes at the time, because the protagonists have a mess and do not want to face it, and more often with a shoe, and then it will be the elephant because yes, as when, in the story ‘The Council’, the net receives a revelation of the grandmother, an epiphany, and equates it to acknowledge “ in the middle of the western metropolis. […] The portentous smell of young elephants in Asia. ”
Toni Güell describes well. Sometimes very well. The tales ‘A kind of beyond’, ‘Delight’ and a good part of ‘Cities and whims’ are full of findings, well -crossed passages, of rich descriptions in which the author dominates the art of representing. A second strong point, from all over the collection, is transversal onirism, that point of elevation that turns the chronicle of a reality into an augmented reality. ‘The Order of the Factors’ and ‘The Patio’ are good examples of how the Airet of the Extraordinary is school through the poorly closed windows of everyday life. In the story ‘The Petroleum Bridge’, this atmosphere of strangeness makes a few peaks.
In the book, however, there is another elephant, who is not mentioned and no one must feel forced to see. It is the heavy prose and phraseology of Toni Güell. Not everywhere, of course, but the author has a throw in verbs, nouns and dictionary adjectives, and a marked tendency to gerundism. In other words, the style is rich, and it is often so much that it spills. The consequences are quite elongated stories, unnecessary repetitions and roosters, if this were an opera. As for gerundism, “they joined”, “they were returning”, “wanted to continue Protestant”, “it is lengthening”, etc., they look like a tic of those who do not trust the power of the Catalan syntax to express the action without having to express it.
Elephants
Toni Güell
Empúries
160 pages. 20 euros @9.99
