Sergi Pàmies

Sergi Pàmies was born in Paris in 1960. Until he was eleven years old he lived in the immigrant neighbourhood of Gennevilliers. For ten years, between 1979 and 1989, he worked as an accountant leading a double life as a writer. Then, three years after publishing his first book, he joined the "prostituted profession of the media". Since then he has been caught up in the wheels within wheels of the machinery that has set apart some of the most potent myths among those that retain us and those that entertain us, for example, television or football. He moves through all the wheeling and dealing, regards things and conjures them up, his only resort being the ephemeral word that crystallises and then suddenly melts away into the din. The more banal, predictable and absurd the raw material, the more Sergi Pàmies reveals its other face, the mirage and the tenderness of it. There are some who, with their eyes rolled back, demand from him a literature of ideas without even being able to recognise this intelligence in movement, this voracious and implacable intelligence that gobbles up everything without being disgusted by anything.

Sergi Pàmies published his first book in September 1986. This was the collection of short stories called T'hauria de caure la cara de vergonya, [You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself], which was followed the next year by another collection of stories titled Infecció [Infection]. In Sergi Pàmies' stories and even his novels, the most important thing is the always the opening sentence. After that, everything rushes along in a cascade that is at once unpredictable and of a ruthless and crystal-clear logic. There are no cracks in the tension of his style and the power of his imaginative unfolding of the story. The taut, transparent surface of the narrative projects well-defined voices and images of such crispness that it is very difficult to talk about it in any way that is not superfluous. He constructs his fiction with an apparently deliberate lack of sophistication that can even be offensive to lovers of programmed convolution, or to those for whom reading is just a way of momentarily -and uselessly- feeling that one is better and wiser than others or than oneself. His writing is not based on the sensationalism of the surprise ending but in the power of a direct, effective style and the impact of an imagination that is modulated in the service of all sorts of registers: tenderness, sarcasm, magic or sordidness. Right from the beginning, Sergi Pàmies has shown that he is particularly gifted in his forthrightly defining the revealing position taken by the narrator with regard to the events being related (somewhere between irony and impassivity) and in skilfully and sagely constructing a series of disturbing situations. Sergi Pàmies does not belong to that race of writers who have "a world"; he is of those who have "a gaze". His is a voice that sees and that comes out as precise, analytical writing. The standpoint he adopts in relationship with the world being scrutinised, a world governed by the run-of-the-mill poetry of the grey man in the street, is defined as follows by the French critic Patrick Rechichian: "No prejudice blocks his gaze and this gives his well-crafted, measured and calculated writing an undeniable effectiveness".

The characters in the stories of Sergi Pàmies are solitary, dissatisfied beings, rather grey, without story or epic, without past or future, trapped in an anxiety-laden present from which they are trying to escape. They move in a contemporary jungle in which fantastic cracks appear (old folk who rent out memories, cash points with a moral conscience that refuse to cough up the money asked for, faces that literally drop in shame, plants that only grow when they are told lies, the foetus that resists being born until daddy comes back from the war...). They circulate among all kinds of misunderstandings, commonplaces and advertising or journalistic mirages, making of their troubled journey through existence an apprenticeship in disappointment. Sergi Pàmies works with the masks of fear. His characters move between the compulsion to flee and that of holding somebody's gaze. He doesn't write for philologists or any kind of bluestocking: he is constantly seeking characters and themes one doesn't usually find in books, letting out an anti-intellectual side of himself that exasperates the culture vultures. He partakes of contemporary narrative forms (cinema, advertising, story, television, radio...) and incorporates them as relevant influences in his work. At no point has he ever claimed that he is heir to any literary tradition. Continue reading...