Pa negre

I must admit that it is especially gratifying for me to be able to speak in praise of Emili Teixidor, author of Pa negre (Black Bread), which was published last year and which the jury of the Lletra d'Or Prize has deemed worthy of this exceptional distinction that we have the honour and the duty to uphold.

I am sure my fellow members of the jury will forgive me for my confessional tone because Emili Teixidor is something of a teacher for me and not just because, as with so many other children of the 1960s, in my early reading as a child and adolescent I discovered the stories and characters in the novels he wrote for young people. Chance also saw to it that I made my publishing debut with one of his novels, Retrat d'un assassí d'ocells (Portrait of a Bird Killer) and that thenceforth we would establish a relationship that I would be so bold - if you will permit me, Emili - to call friendship. Emili was also in publishing then and, thanks to him, I learned a few tricks of the trade that, for the moment, I'll keep to myself, if you don't mind.

This book, Retrat d'un assassí d'ocells, which was published in 1988, was the forceful start of the opening out of a literary universe that, with Pa negre, has culminated in a work that, let me put it like this, is a modest masterpiece. This literary universe had begun to take shape in 1979 with the collection of stories entitled Sic transit Gloria Swanson, and it was still unfolding in 1999 with his book El llibre de les mosques (The Book of the Flies), which was awarded the Sant Jordi Prize.

It might seem that I am saying that Emili Teixidor is always writing the same novel, telling the same story. Perhaps he is. But I don't mind because his narrative voice seduces me and because this universe attracts me as the void sometimes draws to its edge those of us who suffer from vertigo: it is the attraction of what we should reject, the suction effect of the mirror that gives us back a less appealing image of ourselves, the monster that we conceal within. Emili Teixidor's voice has the same effect as this mirror.

Pa negre is set in the harsh times that followed the Civil War, in an atmosphere of mists and rural and industrial drama, a drama in which personal memories, stories and sometimes legends taken from here and there are all intermingled. He constructs a mythical territory set in the region of Osona, which is not just a physical space. It is the moral space of the child who glimpses the adult world, and the moral space of the adolescent, the space of his initiation into life, its secrets, its mysteries, its gift and its pain.

This time, Emili Teixidor decides to adopt the standpoint of Andreu, an innocent and unaware narrator who is virtually without parents for his father is in prison and his mother always in the factory, and who tries to create a haven for himself in the world that surrounds him and in which he has had the good luck - and what a paradox it is - to come under the protection of a couple named Manubens until he chooses, whether consciously or not, whether painfully or not - at least for the reader - between security and rebellion. However, this is not the moment to be spelling out details of the story but rather to focus on one of the elements that, for me (and I am not alone in this), makes the book a very singular one. The power of its language. And the essential, nuclear role this language has in the evolution of the character and in the process of his moral growth. The power of the language, the stylistic texture of the novel. The narrator himself says it: "For the first time I understood the venom that words can contain and how they get inside us even though we don't want them to." The reader can experience this from page one. I am not the only one who thinks so. Ponç Puigdevall remarked on it (El País, 20 November 2003): "Emili Teixidor manages to make the whole novel seem to brim with sound and fury". Julià Guillamón has commented (La Vanguardia, 12 November 2003), "Teixidor knows what he is talking about and his use of Catalan is sensational as he distances himself from it, attributing its most characteristic touches to the grandmother because the narrator has moved out of his own social class and confronts a reality that no longer exists". Again, Joan Triadú (Avui, 18 December 2003) points out without in any way stating the obvious: "Writing, is the art of language." Continue reading...