editorial
Debate in 1996 published a novel, Muntaner 38, José Antonio Garriga Vela, which consider the basis of his later fiction. Was preceded by the award of Jaén Novel, which had granted a jury Caballero Bonald, Ignacio Echevarría, Antonio Soler, Manuel Bértolo Longares and Constantine. In Muntaner 38
displayed the keys of a narrative that is held on the Dodge short on sentence construction, ingenuity in creating phrases that remain in the history of literature (in his works in general a clear appreciation of insightful statements that focus on two or three lines of thought as axiomatic), in the faint development of many characters that come and go again and again involving the reader and cuddling with their ephemeral situations, with its fragments subtle and suggestive. Through the distant perspective sometimes the glass: "That's how I've always preferred to see things. In a cold, distant and accurate, with the look of glass "(p. 14). And above all, in the immediacy of a world, in building interiors to justify existence. Worlds coming and going from past to present (in that game and prolepsis analepsis), creating a closed circle. If their world are also its narrative, which pivots on an axis always very specific. Here crankshaft serves Muntaner 38.
Since Aristotle we know that one thing is quite another story and discourse or argument. Muntaner's speech 38 is organized around a system of accumulation of short situations over an indefinite period running from the author's childhood to dates after the death of his father. Is ample time (about twenty years ago) in which the events, disorganized, are accommodated by a process of assimilation significantly depending on the criteria of the author. The story would be well less relevant than the speech. A speech that in its essence as semiotics would say, also revolves around the character of his father, the tailor, the epicenter of the novel construction, but also about the speed adventure narrative and scenes-short sequence ( "bursts" the narrator tell the story at a time) that enable a shift from one world to another, a family room to another, from one character to another so swiftly. More than the reality that is focused, the narrator is interested in showing a vision of a world, an understanding of a world. And these cumulative processes is organized. This is the victory of the secondary characters. Are those who achieve mastery of the work, although Cristina Moslares, the father and the narrator their most consistent players, at last, the players that determine which closed around them the circle of creation. The literary work has its own laws organizing a world. Garriga Vela is a very precise laws:
Space: Muntaner 38, Barcelona center, near Avenida Diagonal, scar city, the epicenter around which the fictional world tour. Artery but not only his own world, concrete and reduced where being in the world and include it in its concreteness and arbitrariness, on reduction, in its capacity as the epicenter.
Two main characters:
a) Vela Garriga's father, the tailor, as a character embracing the existence of the novel and the author himself. A character (like Kant that compares literary) that does not leave his own world (Kant built his philosophy without leaving Königsberg, Garriga's father built creating costumes-that is, cutting their world-the philosophy of its existence and daily practice), Muntaner 38 and her workshop. A sewing shop that is also the creative shaping metaphor because as they said, "We are in the hands of a few tailors who merely identify and cut our lives" (p. 159). The indeterminacy of existence and the absolute lack of freedom to be what we want to be is that cutting of the fabric of our very existence. A symbol, creating clothes, as the creation of worlds that inhabit a galleon adrift, as the narrator say that he did not want to leave, even if he does his father. With its philosophy of life differs so much that at one point given the narrator say, "My father raised me to live in a world he resigned. I spent a suit that he was too small and uncomfortable. Kept to himself ideals. They knew they were losing battles (...) Who was it really? I've often wondered why I came to hate him so far as to wish his death. Miguel Bobadilla said I was a victim of the ideals of my father. That non-healing wound caused him to me. It may be true. Either way was a person too hard. I did not ignore their recommendations, but rather the opposite (...) I was the serpent's egg. I guess that wars arise civilians. Perhaps there lay the embryo of hatred. To the light of the experience of my father I rebelled against those who destroyed it. I chose another route. Although in the end, both lost the same battle against our own contradictions (p. 160). Being a tailor forms a precise symbolic value in the novel in that capacity tailor creative with his scissors on fabric create a model, the theoretical model that seeks to create for others, though his remains hidden. Hence the organization of a world that is unwilling to live the character who has a slight analogy to Kafka, who, incidentally, admires Garriga Vela. Right from the start, however, emerging ghosts sent by his father: "I willed the bitterness, it is true, and also a world inhabited by ghosts" (p. 70). But his father lives a reverse process to you, while going towards children as a way of being left alone, the narrator flees Garriga it as a way of growing. His father usually said: "In childhood we live, then survives" (p. 58). Garriga wants to grow but it is as if space, Muntaner 38, the time (dictatorship) and prevented the immanent philosophy.
The father, through its recurrent phrases are creating a metaphysics of existence, a way of seeing the world as axiomatic. Say, inter alia: "In life you never know what can happen" (p. 43), "The world is round and that will not wake up in the background" (p. 43). But what also exists is a cutting work moralizing tendency to the formation of the spirit that comes from various reasons which will put into the mouth of his father and allow personal growth or not. For example, when he told his father that "there wherever you go, drag obsessions. "Running away does not help, we must face up to life". "(P. 149). And Muntaner 38 is the magma of obsessions, a magma of a sad sad time.
b) Cristina Moslares as a symbol of eroticism Search of artificial paradises (to the pursuit of fear of failure) and growth in dreams. Dreams that will depend a lot of faith in their achievement, as claimed by his father who after acknowledging that it was all a matter of size emphasized that "the extent of dreams depended on the faith that get put in" (p. 142). At another point, when Cristina returns from America as conqueror of the dream that had haunted all say strict: "America is different" (p. 89) A different country compared to ours where nothing ever happened, although different in fascist propaganda . And in this sense, the characters have a need to go out, find somewhere to rot there ("Who was the city was rotten. The whole country, p. 118). Dreams that always end up frustrated in the narrative of Garriga Vela. The narrator knows, as he said at the end of the work, it will not "nowhere." At first dreamed of America (the predominant theme of a personal dream was very common in young people of that time, America was the end of a tunnel. All good things came from America. For example, it was common to hear, this is very good, it that is American. America comes with the power of a dream. Moslares Cristina also goes to America). But Cristina Moslares above all is the passion and eroticism, an incentive to live, but knew he was a toy in his hands and was always she who had "Kristin had made the wish on a rope around my neck in the dark" (p. 100).
Muntaner 38 is divided into eight chapters, each with an exact name (I) The look of glass, (ii) When the world goes, (III) timeout, (IV) The quiet of the holidays, ( V) The silhouette of chalk, (VI) Wait on the Moon (it expressly written in italics), (VII) happy and (VIII) The fourth of the press. Of these, the first two and the eighth is the largest in number and the last page, which acts as an epilogue, is the shortest, with the sixth. But what meaning has this precise structure in his work when everything is a cluster of characters who come and go like a mousetrap, Muntaner 38. Let go gradually discovering. Initially (first chapter) is the projection of the overall image that sums up his characters space and moving with the same palette (the narrator is an amateur painter) that makes up your pictures with impressionistic strokes of color, even the palette of chiaroscuro. If until the fourth chapter, the protagonist's father has an all-embracing space, will be from the fifth time of institution in the work a kind of love story between the narrator and Cristina Moslares, wishes and feelings.
the author starts the novel Catalan with a first sentence that frames a dream, the dream of America: "I've never been to America" \u200b\u200b(p. 7). A startup that takes us into the construction of a world, while he, a boy, color maps and his father with the chalk mark the outline of the patterns, in a manner similar to their own maps or your own world. Both begin to develop, as a microcosm. A world that, as we shall see at the end of the novel, does not lead to nowhere, a truncated world without perspective: "The image of the enchanted petered out in the distance. Like the colors of the maps, the names of employers, clouded eyes of the telescope "(p. 171). Garriga Vela has built a world circular, around a symbolic accurate picture: coloring his maps and the father, lathering contours, silhouettes. But everything falls apart and ends up becoming a "sad story", an allegory of the defeat. There is a limited microcosm
(Muntaner 38) and a dream in the novel progresses but ends up being cut off: "The limits of the world is restricted to the sidewalk outside around the block" (p. 7). A space for his father has the value of the metaphoric-symbolic "My father said that the balcony of our house was like America, and the street was the rest of the world" (p. 11). The view from above, from the strength to govern everything. But the vision does not give life but creating false perspectives. A distortion of this telescope with which he watched from the Tibidabo and Montjuic. But the narrator
colors only countries known for the colors but by recognizing the things he is in a process of construction, initiatory path of discovery of a reality that does not stop at anything: "Life was a blank map where I was recognizing the names of things "(p. 46). So "every citizen is a country. Each family, one world "(p. 47) And so the narrator is aware that to build your fictional world is like build a map that will never end. Maps are never finished. And that process is organized through the list of events ranging from their family environment (especially focused on the father figure, the reflections on the mother are tenuous, subtle, with a muffled mystery ("My mother dreams of a kept secret past, p. 79) or clearly ironic, as when he says: "My mother was always a bit morbid. I read magazines of events. I heard in the radio programs where people sought public responses to private affairs," p. 155). Crowd
characters come and go just stitched, hand with pins and tailor's brief and synthetic adventures ending in the story: his childhood games ("a childhood gray), the space sector's own block and the neighbors who live in it, as Don Esteban, the lord of the blind (which smelt numbers): "I smell to the future" (p. 11), he said, his uncle John who took him to Tibidabo, the friend of his father, Alfonso red (one of the secondary characters more attractive) who did everything to the left, the neighbor of the second, the taxidermist Matthias (who could pass for a grotesque character or berlanguiano) Kim'sy club Margarita Price evenings of boxing matches with the character Caraplato; the Mercedes ironers and Teresa, her sisters, the family Amat and Elvira, the woman's doctor, Violet, which was platonic love, the family Guijarro ; Díaz del Camino Professor Training National Spirit, Angel Moslares, the photographer, the Kawolinski Polish family, the priest Antonio María Claret and his love for him, his touching (never goes into the rough, but he suggests), Carlos, dart shooter, Carmen and her four children, their grandparents, Mr. Rico and his family ... They all contribute to create human geography if your father and he tried organized by colors and soap physical geography, the pattern of existence.
But there is also thinking of building their own character through their world and their own psychology, her shyness, for example: "When I came home visits hiding under the dining table." Or the school that connected him with the smell of shit or vision that others had on him, nicknamed The Boon. And above all, projecting a kind of image accompanying evil of a fatality states: "My mother said to the friends that I was not bad, but had bad luck" (p. 20).
There is an obsession with time. Marked by the date of 20 November, where he was born, also in the works operate these dates, the 20N associated with tragic elements or chronologies of historical roots as the death of Franco, the death of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Buenaventura Durruti ..., hence the father said he had been born the day of the dead. Also the dates are crucial from the outset in the novel Pacific. A time and season, an area bordering the sadness and melancholy that emerges in this novel of personal and family memory where reality and fiction, as is usual in his narrative since then pretend to be unique and unique, take on again and the likelihood or the lie that makes it timeless.
In short, a good novel tells of a conquered world and reproduced, it could be for the imagination, as the opening words of the protagonist, but that remains to nihilism and in the past: "There were only traces of ash that wind pushing the sea. "
