Albert Sánchez Piñol

Albert Sánchez Piñol (Barcelona, 1965) is an anthropologist who specializes in Africa. His first novel, Cold Skin, was a literary and publishing phenomenon. It has been translated into twenty-two languages in twenty-four different countries. He has also published various short stories as well as a satirical non-fiction essay about the nature of dictatorship.

The day I met Albert Sánchez Piñol we were surrounded by people who were watching us. We had arranged to meet at Barcelona's Modern Art Museum, then at the Ciutadella park, in order to record one of the interviews for the TV programme Alexandria. It was a triple bill, featuring Albert and two real veterans - Josep Maria Espinàs and Ana María Matute. His novel La pell freda ( Cold Skin: A Novel) had been harvesting no end of readers, yet the author was a complete unknown. He did not like to show himself very much in public. But not only that. He had a reputation for being a very reserved person. I had liked the novel very much. But I even liked better the fact that for the first time in recent history a text in Catalan had won international acclaim by itself, without any institutional help of any kind. I rang Isabel Martí, the publisher, and I also rang Albert later, foregoing the customary intermediaries of television practice. He probably liked what I said to him, because he turned up at the Museum and we recorded one of the best interviews I can recall.

Two details from that day stick out in my mind. The museum had seen the last day of its life there. The collection would be transferred to the Catalonian National Art Museum (MNAC) and the old building would be taken over by the Catalan Parliament. If an art museum has normally an air of a cemetery, that day the elegiac tone was the dominant note. While I was getting changed for the interview with Albert alone in one of those museum rooms, at one stage I raised my eyes and came across the stony look of Llimona's master sculpture Distress. In those very moments, as I was walking around in underpants in the presence of this lady in distress, the Parliament, next to the Museum, indeed, next door to it, was getting ready to celebrate the fact that Pasqual Maragall was about to take office as President of Catalonia.

Ever since that day, now distant, in which I was confronted with Llimona's stony Distress, I have occasionally run into Albert here and there. He seems to be progressively less reserved, yet the fact of being reserved does not stop him from speaking his mind. And he speaks it exactly as he writes. Mincing no words. I love his uncompromising radicalism. His writing distils independence of thought. We, Catalans, are the offspring of a country in its death throes that still does not know what it wants to be when it grows up, but luckily we've still got Piñol. I like countries with "pinyol", that is, with backbone.

Màrius Serra, "Amb pinyol", La Universitat, num., 31 (March 2005)

The central character of La pell freda is fear. Never mind the now already famous "granotots" (frog-monsters)or the aggressive Batis Caffó. It is fear. The delocalised Irishman in an unknown island experiences fear and makes us experience it when he fights simultaneously with the amphibious beasts of an unknown nature, and with the only other human being in the island. "That gun butt that was thumping me like a club was not hate", we read, "but fear". Fear is the driving force in the world evoked by the novel. This omnipresent force gives tension to a moral narrative written with an austerity of means. Sánchez Piñol favours direct style. He thinks that the perfect sentence is made up of four words, and he flees from those subordinate-clause structures that Pla used to call "sentences with a fish tail". An intelligent use of the keys to the fantastic genre allows him to keep the readers of La pell freda attentive to the ground they are treading on. Regardless of the temptation to look up felt by the eyes concentrated on the text, the narrative of the facts compels the reader to keep looking down. It is like an excursion across a landscape from childhood that we would like to look at again to check whether it agrees with our memory of it, but the terrain is so uneven that we must check where we put our feet at every step. Nothing of what we read there is alien to us. Many fears that we are not even capable of naming enter us through our eyes, paragraph after paragraph. Continue reading...