Miquel de Palol

Might we distinguish between prose and poetry in Palol? The answer is yes, in a descriptive sense, but not so much if we take into account two basic aspects of his literary world. First, El sol i la mort [The Sun and Death] formally raises the quest for a kind of poetry that I would venture to call syntagma. By this I mean to say that the construction of the verse is not centred so much on its syllabic distribution as on the disposition of the syntagmas of his sentences. Hence he pulls together long periods that frequently end up pushing sentences to the limits of their sense as structure or, on other occasions, evaporate before an infiniteness of meaning, as if they had been poured into some deep and mysterious abyss.

The operation is intelligent because it seeks new ways of expression on the basis of poetic tradition, which is to say of a syllabic harmony that must be established. Palol shifts the classic definition of standard syllabic space to that of "syllabic time" and, as a result, syntagma plays an essential role in his work. [...] The product is verse that tends to lengthiness and enjambement, the long syntactic span that he has been manifesting in his big narrative projects in recent years. We might thus conclude that his passage through prose has been fundamental in his acquiring practice in the direction we have established above. The distinction between pose and poetry fades away, then, and the concepts of rhythm in prose and rhythm in verse have a common denominator: syntagmatic play.

Second, and from the thematic standpoint, we also find points of engagement between the narrative experience of this period and the new collections of poems. In El sol i la mort, the vision of the world that is presented is complemented in many ways with the novels El jardí dels set crepuscles [The Garden of the Seven Twilights] and Igur Neblí. To some extent, one of Palol's merits is his having ` vitally, intellectually and creatively comprehended postmodernity. [...]

Vicenç Llorca, "Deu anys després, torna el Miquel de Palol poeta" [Ten Years on, the Return of Miquel de Palol, the Poet], El Temps, Nº. 621 (13 May 1996).

The book (Les concessions [The Concessions]), the blackest of Palol's work, is comparable in his literary career with Baltasar Porcel's novel Lola i els peixos morts [Lola and the Dead Fishes] in the sense that, with the latter work, a dejected, claustrophobic view of the individual also represented a new direction in Porcel's literary career. If we were once faced with a complex poet working on different stages with playfulness, philosophy, erudition, politics and sex, now we have a narrative of everyday matters, set in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Gràcia. And may the ingenuous reader not be taken in by the back cover: there is nothing kindly or complacent in the portrait Palol offers of humankind. As for the format, if an essentially a protean writer prevailed before, now he is inclining towards synthesis. [...]

The novel, eminently set in dialogue and very well set in dialogue at that does not fit in any "clear line" of Catalan literature. [...] Palol is still intoxicated with the procedures of his extraordinarily powerful narrative vigour.

Estanislau Vidal-Folch, "En volem encara més" [We Want Even More], El Periódico de Catalunya. Llibres (20 May 2004).

From the stance of a certain essential scepticism, the author sometimes expresses himself (in Els proverbis [The Proverbs]) at the fringes of paradox, taking to an extreme a cultivated cynicism that strives to remove the reader from any kind of conformity with regard to generally-accepted clichés and truths. These are proverbs that fluctuate between aphorism and thought, in the Leopardian sense and that of the French tradition too, in order to bring together ideas on morality, politics and art in a marriage of preferably romantic lineage. Continue reading...