Joan-Lluís Lluís

Joan-Lluís Lluís (Perpignan, 1963), journalist and novelist, is one of the most notable writers in French Catalonia. His oeuvre, written exclusively in Catalan, is a unique and remarkable voice of new Catalan fiction. The Day of the Bear was awarded the prestigious Joan Crexells Prize in 2005.

Joan-Lluís Lluís is the author of five novels and the brief collection of essays entitled Conversa amb el meu gos sobre França i els francesos (Conversation with my Dog about France and the French - 2002), which marks a turning point in his work.

Els ulls de sorra (Eyes of Sand - 1993), Vagons robats (Stolen Carriages - 1996), Cirera (Cherry - 1997) and El crim de l'escriptor cansat (The Crime of the Weary Writer - 2000) all have, as a common element, the voice of a narrator, a character who breaks the rules. In the first novel, this is an old Arab sergeant, survivor of the Algerian War, and witness to the crimes of a military man who is the National Front candidate in some municipal elections in Normandy. In Vagons robats it is a boy from Provence who runs away from his village and family. He has worked for the railways and is entitled to free transport in the SCNF network. He travels all over France for a year, doing odd jobs and stealing in trains. Cirera is the diary of a girl who is uninhibited about sex and her account of it, which enables her to shake off her emptiness and boredom, hints at a dark, unhealthy side of her character. El crim de l'escriptor cansat brings two complementary characters into confrontation. The first is the police inspector Ximenès, who is the son of a Gypsy and from Provence. He wants to be a writer and breaks police rules to get to know the novelist Pierre Alessandri, who is suspected of killing his wife, in order to blackmail him. The novel written by Alessandri (under the name of Ximenès) is about a Catalan soldier, Adrien Farines, who died of his wounds in the early days of World War One. His name appears in the list on a monument honouring the dead in the War, the monolith of Oms, which according to Lluís in Conversa (Conversation) is a symbol of Catalan submission in France.

Joan-Lluís Lluís's characters are outsiders who cannot fit into the reality around them. The fact that they exist and that we find them writing represents an attack on the order that has been imposed by the powers-that-be in the province. Driss Mehamli is killed. Ximenès (who is possessed by the absurd idea of supplanting Alessandri) becomes an object of ridicule in a devastating campaign when it is found that his novel has been plagiarised from a Belgian work published in the 1920s. Lluís portrays a fractured world. And the fact that we never discover what causes the cracks heightens the sense of strangeness. He describes the criminal behaviour of the military who took part in the repression of the FLN, the lack of consistency in young people and in provincial life, the urge to live another kind of life, the impossibility of doing it, and the impunity of those who opt for collaborating with the powers-that-be. All his novels present an asphyxiating situation, building up to a dramatic ending. I think it is quite significant that it is only in the first, Els ulls de sorra, that the main character finds someone to talk to, in this case a young journalist who takes down Driss Mehamli's declarations before the National Front thugs kill him. In Vagons robats this possibility of having an interlocutor has disappeared. Antoni Bellefargues writes eleven letters to a girl he met during a brief stay in Brittany, revealing significant aspects of his life. The letters never reach their destination. They are like the briefly flaring matches lit by Bellefargues and his partner for the night when they are fooling around in the Irish Tavern of Saint-Malo. In El crim de l'escriptor cansat, Ximenès' relationship with Alessandri and with his friend Picard (the corrupt policeman who has changed sides to live off prostitution and drug-dealing) is not one that can be regarded as consisting of successful acts of communication. Ximenès is a frustrated character who, bearing the stigma of having a Gypsy father feels discriminated against when he is in Paris and, despite the temporary success he achieves as a writer, he never manages to overcome the feeling of inferiority and shame that the capital brings out in him. Continue reading...