Them too

At the time of writ­ing, six out of the ten best-sell­ing works of fic­tion in Cata­lan are the work of women writ­ers; and of those six, four are orig­i­nals by Cata­lan lan­guage au­thors, two of whom, - Marta Or­riols and Marta Ma­rine-Dominé - are new on the scene. And al­though not on any lists at the mo­ment, there are plenty of other women writ­ers - such as Eva Bal­tasar, Tina Vallès and Marta Ro­jals - who were un­known names just a few years ago but who have in re­cent times man­aged that trick­i­est of tricks - to be both best-sell­ers and crit­i­cally ac­claimed. In a nut­shell, when the Cata­lan Day of the Book (aka Sant Jordi’s Day aka the Day of the Rose) rolls around on the 23rd of this month, it shouldn’t sur­prise any­one that many of the sign­ing stands will be manned by women, thanks to this con­tem­po­rary bloom­ing of fe­male fic­tion in Cata­lan. This is not, of course, the first such ef­flo­res­cence: women writ­ers have been cru­cial to Cata­lan lan­guage fic­tion since 1904, when Cate­rina Al­bert (writ­ing under the then ap­par­ently more ac­cept­able male pseu­do­nym of Víctor Català) brought out ’Soli­tude’ (Eng­lish ver­sion: 1992) which the New York Times de­scribed as one of the very first proto-fem­i­nist nov­els in Eu­rope. Roughly con­tem­po­rary was Carme Karr, a mil­i­tant sup­porter of women’s rights who wrote plays, nov­els, jour­nal­ism and short sto­ries, as well as edit­ing a mag­a­zine with the self-ex­plana­tory name of ’Fem­i­nal’. A lit­tle later, in the ’Thir­ties, the most-trans­lated fe­male au­thor in Cata­lan, Mercè Rodor­eda, pub­lished her first nov­els, but didn’t re­ally find her voice until she wrote from Swiss exile in the 1960s, when she pro­duced mas­ter­pieces like ’Di­a­mond Square’ (the third and best Eng­lish trans­la­tion came out in 2014). When Franco be­lat­edly popped his mil­i­taris­tic clogs in 1975 and the cen­sor­ship of Cata­lan lan­guage books ceased, the flood­gates opened. The lat­ter half of the decade saw the ap­pear­ance of books on fem­i­nist the­ory by Maria Aurèlia Cap­many, and the emer­gence of the pow­er­ful work­ing-class poet Maria Mercè Marçal. The Ma­jor­can writer Maria Antònia Oliver kick-started fe­male noir in Cata­lan, a tra­di­tion con­tin­ued today by au­thors such as Teresa Solana and Anna-Maria Vil­la­longa. A young Montser­rat Roig brought out her pre­co­cious nov­els and an ex­cel­lent his­tory of the Cata­lans in­terned in Nazi labour camps (a taboo sub­ject up until then). An­other Ma­jor­can, Carme Riera, in­tro­duced fe­male eroti­cism into Cata­lan lan­guage lit­er­a­ture. Later, in the ’Eight­ies and ’Nineties, Maria Bar­bal wrote of the hard­ships of life in arid west­ern Cat­alo­nia (her first novel, ’Stone in a Land­slide’ ap­peared in Eng­lish in 2010). This side of the mil­len­nium, a whole slew of women writ­ers has ap­peared, in­clud­ing Najat El Hachmi, some of whose most im­por­tant and sur­pris­ing nov­els - such as ’The Last Pa­tri­arch’ (Eng­lish ver­sion: 2012) - deal with the ex­pe­ri­ence of Mo­roc­can im­mi­grants in Cat­alo­nia; and the satirist Empar Mo­liner, who, along with other works of fic­tion and non-fic­tion, brought out her best known col­lec­tion of sto­ries ’I Love You When I’m Drunk’ in 2004 (it came out in Eng­lish just four years later). They and sev­eral other post-2000 writ­ers lead us up to the emer­gence of the afore­men­tioned clus­ter of new fe­male au­thors in Cata­lan (there is also now an in­creas­ing ten­dency to revalue the work of long-for­got­ten women writ­ers. Do­lors Mon­serdà is a case in point: un­re­mem­bered and un­pub­lished for over a cen­tury, the two best nov­els of this pi­o­neer of mod­ern fe­male fic­tion in Cata­lan - a vic­tim, like so many oth­ers of overly mas­cu­line canon-mak­ing - have now been made avail­able to the pub­lic for the first time since 1917).

This said, the usual cruel mech­a­nism of Sant Jordi’s Day won’t be let­ting cer­tain writ­ers off the hook, ir­re­spec­tively of whether they’re fe­male or male, any more than it has in the past. This is be­cause at most of the sign­ing stands book­shops put writ­ers of lit­er­ary fic­tion to­gether with the most com­mer­cial au­thors of the year (peo­ple who write self-help books, eas­ily pre­dictable genre nov­els aka crowd-pleasers, TV stars’ spin-off vol­umes, and the like). If you’re not as com­mer­cial a writer as they, you will have no al­ter­na­tive but to watch in hor­ror as huge crowds form to buy the oeu­vre of the pop­u­lar local news­reader or Miche­lin chef (or who­ever) next to you, block­ing all view of your­self and the novel you’ve spent years (and years) work­ing on. Ei­ther that, or you might be sent to sign at one of the big de­part­ment stores out­side the cen­tre of Barcelona, where peo­ple more in­ter­ested in pur­chas­ing un­der­wear or de­signer train­ers than books waltz past you with un­feigned in­dif­fer­ence. This is hu­mil­i­at­ing, to say the least, for any se­ri­ous writer. Un­less, or course, like so many cur­rent women writ­ers in Cata­lan, you hap­pen to be both a best-seller and crit­i­cally ac­claimed, in which case you will find your­self sign­ing like biros were going out of fash­ion while har­bour­ing a dis­creet yet jus­ti­fied con­tempt for the TV star (or who­ever) next to you...

books san­tjordi