At two it will be three

As a mere presentation, given that I have never reviewed Pàmies (Santi did do so some years ago), I will say that the first times I saw him speak (he is a regular presence in the written press and audiovisual media in Catalonia) I was somewhat shocked by that sarcastic and close tone and it seemed like too much inspired in Quim Monzó. Then, over time, and by paying attention to his loquacity (and at the same time that Monzó became less visible) I began to understand his own voice. Little facts about his life: he was born in Paris where his mother, a writer in exile, and his father, a communist politician in exile, met. Born in 1960, he moved to Barcelona when he had studied in French. That’s why not gracias to that) is Amélie Nothomb’s regular translator.

I’m not going to take it into account.

At two it will be three It is a collection of stories whose autobiographical tone is not intended to be masked. Curious, there is no story with the title of the book that seems to be a problem of the book. And some of those ten stories don’t even have a plot with their characters, they are rather scraps that could compose a kind of twilight chapter of a somewhat altered biography. It is not that Pàmies wants to pass these stories off as autofiction. On the contrary, the seasoning of personal circumstances is constant and we are faced with an exercise in timid exhibitionism (permit the oxymoron) in which Pàmies appeals to intimacy with surgical precision so measured that it opposes it to sentimentality. And he plays with the reader from the first moment: the first story talks about virginity as an object that has been lost and is in some corner. This little joke does not last and the stories combine pure almost situationist gestures – the writer hiding in the bed of his room while he thinks he hears how a thief has entered his home and is ransacking it – with elements of greater substance, such as his coexistence with some totem. of the Catalan literary imagination – Vázquez Montalbán – in the field of literary flights and conferences. A curious story that exemplifies the authors as beings with limited social skills. I insist on his ability to avoid frivolity and transcendence in equal parts. Quite a few stories mention their ancestors and not a second of imposition.

Pàmies, restless ass that maintains a presence in the media and that I recommend paying attention to, demonstrates in At two it will be three that his constant contact with current cultural events allows him to adapt his literary message. Descriptions, just the right ones, dialogues, in dribs and drabs and with an exquisite sense of containment. Just a hundred pages that, I imagine, Pàmies has stripped of tinsel and superficiality. So we are left with that feeling. That of a professional writer who freely decides what to write about. Here. about himself and about how he faces absolute maturity, and although his way of approaching it is sarcastic and playful, his sincerity is also absolute.