Julià de Jòdar

Julià de Jòdar first became known in 1997 with The Angel of the Second Death, the first volume of a trilogy entitled Fate and the Shadows, which received wide critical acclaim and was awarded the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona ("City of Barcelona Prize"). The Man who Loved Natàlia Vidal won the distinguished Prudenci Bertrana Prize in 2003.


Julià de Jòdar (Badalona, 1942), has a degree in Chemical Engineering (1964) and another in Modern and Contemporary History (1973). He studied theatre at the Adrià Gual School of Dramatic Art, where he worked in Ricard Salvat's group in different productions, including Salvador Espriu's Ronda de mort a Sinera (Death around Sinera, 1965). Since then, he has worked in publishing. He was actively engaged in the anti-Franco struggle in the student movement, in radical trade-unionism and with the pro-independence Catalan left. In 1984, he unsuccessfully presented a two-hundred-page novel, La pira dels dies (The Pyre of the Days), for the Josep Pla Prize. The book was not published but would subsequently serve as a quarry of germinal material that Julià de Jòdar would mine, re-write and probe ever-deeper over twenty years so that it expanded and crystallised into the more than a thousand pages of the trilogy L'atzar i les ombres (Chance and Shadows), which is indubitably one of the landmarks in contemporary Catalan fiction.

The trilogy L'atzar i les ombres explores the process of the shaping of moral conscience in a boy, Gabriel Caballero, the son of immigrants who are living in a neighbourhood that spreads out from the crossroads of Guifré and Cervantes streets in Badalona (both of which really exist in the Gorg neighbourhood), in the wake of three bloody events that agitated the calm, stagnant waters of peace in Franco's times. Along with text-book realism, the book also displays a hybridisation of genres, including dreams, apparitions, sub-genres, songs, symbols and psychoanalytic introspection. With his roots in the wellspring of oral history "the boy who took over from Aunt Eulògia", Gabriel Caballero, protagonist and narrator, plagued and challenged by conflicting versions and documents, explores the memories and mirages of an adolescent who invents himself as he is being moulded by the family, the neighbourhood, the factory and his specific experience of History with a capital H. We witness the moral apprenticeship of someone who is writing a trilogy in which he explores the paths of imagination and memory. As the trilogy advances, we see how all this casts light on a process where, starting out from biographical data, someone can construct fiction that at once contradicts itself and aspires to forge literary truths.

Julià de Jòdar writes as both myth-maker and analyst, superimposing and bringing into dialogue different senses in this series of novels concerning acquisition of knowledge but that also constitute social frescos. His novels combine his ability to tap into the heartbeat of post-war Badalona and an exigent and radical approach to writing that draws on the techniques and resources of modernity (fragmentation, polyphony, fiction-truth dialectics, poetics, the monologue, the essay, the viewpoint) as well-honed instruments of knowledge and of verbal restitution of complexity faced with simplifying discourse. It is at this felicitous fulcrum that the evocative and cognitive powers of writing are balanced with the unusual result of a first-rate novelistic project.

The first part of the trilogy, L'angel de la segona mort (The Angel of the Second Death) (1997) takes the reader back to 1956, focussing on the mythologized resonance of the revolutionary violence of the Civil War in a fourteen-year-old adolescent who lives with his working-class family, consisting of a castrating mother and a father who is just a ghostly presence. Even as the memory of a baker who died at the hands of an anarchist firing squad still resounds, a new bloody event shows the precariousness of the post-war order with all its renunciations and betrayals in the depths of a defeated neighbourhood. The world here depicted is dispossessed, governed by the laws of repressed desires, obliteration of memory and moral paucity, tacit pacts and taboos. In its distance-runner's prose, the novel reflects on the guilt, goodness and truth. Continue reading...