Mercè Ibarz

Mercè Ibarz (Saidí, 1954) is author, journalist and cultural critic. She has published works of fiction and biographies and writes regularly on art and photography for the newspaper La Vanguardia.

A la ciutat en obres by Mercè Ibarz appears to be, within her writing as a whole, the prelude to new music, both in the variety of themes and the registers it presents and in its revealing a new direction within the author's literary evolution.

This latter assertion will probably require me to clarify a few points. Mercè Ibarz is a seasoned writer. Since her long-ago essay on the history of ETA in 1981, she has produced numerous articles and essays in a wide range of publications and among her books are a biography of Mercè Rodoreda (1991, 1997) and a notable study (1999) on Tierra sin pan (Land without Bread), Luis Buñuel's

hair-raising film. To stick to her works of fiction, in 1993 she published La terra retirada (The Withdrawn Land), a book that is both attractive and difficult to pigeonhole but that is somewhere between evocation, a story and a report, in which she describes the past and present of the village where she was born, Saidí, in the Baix Cinca region, in the frontier area between Aragon and Catalonia. This is a bit of the country that is often both overlooked and looked down upon, which has undergone an accelerated transformation of its world that has not always been entirely in its best interests and which is now in a disoriented limbo between the market economy and unproductive subsidy, a marginalised, isolated, yet nonetheless, beautiful and vital land. The intermittent trips back home to this withdrawn country by the protagonist-narrator are at once journeys back to the past, which she evokes very vividly, and confrontation with the difficulties and worries of the present, with a feeling that is somewhere between uncertainty and coming to terms with the present, which she sometimes resolves by words of denunciation. She pulls it all together in language that is rich, enormously precise and full of flavour, which to me, at least, is very close and familiar.

The story, understood as the unravelling of the vicissitudes of individual or collective experience, with both crux and denouement, is reduced to a minimum of precise details: characters that become presences, words and fears, a few illustrative anecdotes, all of it suspended in the void or parenthesis that life now is (in the eyes of the main character) in this nucleus or centre of her world of memory, which has become, in everyone's eyes, a periphery, an excluded land.

Mercè Ibarz's second work of fiction, La palmera de blat (The Palm Tree of Wheat) (1995) retrieved the same characters, places, circumstances and protagonist-narrator, but now with a less evocative and more determinedly narrative tone. After this, there was a lull for seven years during which she did not publish any work of fiction, but this silence was broken this year with her A la ciutat en obres. It is not as if there is no continuity between the earlier works and this one. Even at first glance, some relationships are evident. First of all, she establishes a highly articulated and defined first-person voice. This is narrative that is drawn from the standpoint of the most exigent individuality, even though the writer's gaze attentively captures (and denounces when necessary, as I have said) the changes in collective life. But her gaze, in these books is the distant one of a witness. A witness who is, so to speak, a participant at a distance. Withdrawn too, in a certain sense. It is not the flow of a free consciousness, like Joyce's, but the voice of somebody who assiduously observes, takes note and reflects on what she has seen. Both in her early books and in some of the stories of A la ciutat en obres, it is no coincidence that the voice that speaks to us is that of somebody who works as a journalist. Continue reading...