Hit it

Three, maybe four, years ago, a friend gave me – or lent me, I can't re­mem­ber – a book of sto­ries ('Haunted', 2005) by Chuck Palah­niuk. I didn't touch the thing, put off as I was by some un­ex­cit­ing non-fic­tion I'd pre­vi­ously come across by the same au­thor. But as all the peo­ple I knew who had read Palah­niuk's fic­tion – and there seemed to be plenty of them - had al­ways made much of it, the other day I picked up 'Haunted' and gave it a go. It turned out to be suc­ces­sion of tales filed with can­ni­bal­ism, viral sick­ness, self-mu­ti­la­tion, star­va­tion and rou­tine mur­der. Its con­cen­tra­tion on gris­li­ness, vi­o­lence and bod­ily func­tions - at Palah­niuk's live read­ings of the book, sev­eral mem­bers of the au­di­ence never fail to faint - re­minded me of a Cata­lan short story writer I've just dis­cov­ered, called Damià Bardera. Now, I know Palah­niuk is a world-class au­thor who has sold mil­lions of copies of his books and has been trans­lated into dozens of lan­guages; and that Bardera is a lit­tle-known writer (even in Cat­alo­nia) who has been pub­lished in one lan­guage only by a one-horse house tucked away in Vi­lanova i la Geltrú; but I couldn't help feel­ing that when it came to light­ing up the dark side of life – the de­clared aim of both writ­ers - Bardera some­how just has the edge on Palah­niuk.

In his new col­lec­tion, 'Con­tes de propina' ('Extra Tales') Bardera takes a se­ries of mainly au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal episodes from his in­fancy and ado­les­cence and turns them into in­sin­u­a­tions of the hor­ror of adult­hood, being as they are re­plete with ca­sual deaths, men­tally or phys­i­cally im­paired chil­dren, em­bar­rass­ing phys­i­cal mal­func­tions, al­co­holism and sui­cide.

Palah­niuk, as men­tioned, deals in roughly the same fare, but dolls it up with out­landish names for the char­ac­ters and over-the-top sce­nar­ios, so that it has a comic-book feel; by con­trast, Bardera's sin­is­ter episodes are writ­ten with a throw­away non­cha­lance and are placed in every­day set­tings, thus mak­ing them feel much closer to (any­one's) home. To top it all, in the sec­ond part of the book, he changes for­mat, switch­ing to one para­graph fan­tasies which pack punch after punch: lonely shop win­dow dum­mies call­ing each other on mo­biles, a spat-on child whose head gen­er­ates rain­bows, a sky full of spi­ders and rusty wire... It may seem fu­tile to write in Eng­lish about an au­thor who is only avail­able in Cata­lan, but I would bet any­thing you like that Damià Bardera will be trans­lated. And that, sooner or later, if you read at all, you'll be giv­ing him a try.