Eduard Márquez

Eduard Márquez (Barcelona, 1960) has written books of poetry, collections of short stories and novels for children and adults.

His early commitment to poetry (La travesía innecesaria [The Unnecessary Crossing], 1991) and Antes de la nieve [Before the Snow] (1994), both works written in Spanish) has marked his particular way of understanding literature: a poetics of "less is more". His apparently simple, sober prose of forceful sentences shapes an elliptic, synthetic style packed with lyrical density, in which he eliminates everything that is not necessary for attaining the utmost concision. The aim of Eduard Márquez is to tell his story with the minimum possible elements: to achieve a transparent, finely-honed language with nothing superfluous. One result of this stylistic commitment to austerity is his obsession for finding the exact word, the precise expression and lexical purity. To this is added his concern for the musicality and euphony of a prose text that seeks to eliminate repetition and any hint of cacophony. The outcome of all the author's rigorous polishing of the language, very similar to a poet's, is a stylisation of narrative language that comes close to poetic language, which then means that his novels can be read as poems.

This formal commitment also extends to the nuts and bolts of his literature. He designs his narrative structures with engineering precision and astonishing effectiveness, respects them scrupulously but also manages to conceal them from the reader who simply enjoys a text that seems to flow easily and spontaneously.

The working method behind all this is highly exigent rigour, meticulousness, perfectionism, lentitude, accurate design of the narrative devices, and all the correcting that is necessary. It is a way of working that is totally compatible with Márquez's ethics, in other words, his respect for the writer's trade, his esteem for steady toil day after day, and his upholding of the position that readers deserve an honest piece of work. It is not surprising, then, that it takes him an average of three years to write a novel and that none of them exceeds 150 pages. His concern for style is patent, both in the first collections of short stories and in the three novels for adults he has published. It is also noticeable in the nine novels he has written for children.

All of this has the effect that Eduard Márquez's fiction does not permit the reader to skim through his books on autopilot. Instead it demands constant, sustained attention. They are very intense works that can, and demand to be read in one sitting.

Zugzwang and L'eloqüència del franctirador

The short-story collections Zugzwang (1995) and L'eloqüència del franctirador [The Sharpshooter's Eloquence] (1998) mark the beginning of Márquez's narrative production in Catalan.

Zugzwang consists of 43 very short stories of an average of three pages each and, even though they are independent, they form a strangely interrelated whole. Irrationality and absurdity seep through the fissures of an apparently real world, playing havoc with everything. The identities of the characters crack and thrust them into the most absolute bewilderment - they don't recognise the world or their own existence, they strive to achieve a face that nobody will mistake, they get themselves killed so as not to have to commit suicide, they watch the video of their own burial, they fall in love with themselves - or they are impelled to copy, to vampirise or set about the crudest usurpation of the lives of others when they can't stand their own, choosing somebody at random to strip him of his existence or to drain her vital energy. Some manage to make clones of themselves so as to be free of their routines while others are victims of the misdeeds of their double. Characters out of literary and art works, or even a ghost, come to life to win the hearts of, or take revenge on real people, thus underscoring the precariousness of their identities. The main characters of the stories are always in zugzwang, a chess term that means, however a player moves, it will be a bad move because his or her situation will always be worse then the present one. With all this, Márquez's finely-honed, synthetic and essential prose bears witness to his poetic commitment and becomes a true manifesto of style. Continue reading...