The art of wearing a trench coat

Original language: Catalan
Original title: The art of wearing a scarf
Translation: the author himself
Year of publication: 2018
Valuation: highly recommended

Based on his work, we should think that The art of wearing a trench coat It is just another collection of short stories or articles by Pàmies, but it turns out that it is one that persists particularly in whoever reads it: we are facing an open homage to the figure of his parents. Gregorio López Raimundo (that’s his name, Pàmies took the surname of his mother, also a writer) was a left-wing politician who suffered exile under Franco and returned to Catalonia during the transition. Teresa Pàmies, a renowned writer. Sergi Pámies was born in France due to their exile situation, both unequivocally committed to the Republican side and the anti-Franco struggle. This situation affects their strange relationship with them, a very unusual relationship since they were clandestine, hidden under false identities, an issue that was impractical for a conventional family coexistence, but which gives rise to curious situations, distant by course of the most glamorous dynamics of series like The Americans: just normal people trying to live a normal existence.

It is inevitable that the tone in these stories is somewhat twilight: both parents have already died, but Pàmies faces the issue, from a literary point of view, with enormous dignity and without the slightest appeal to emotional pornography. Far from creating icons, it openly admits the defects that they may have, personality defects (normally, that of someone who believes that living with affinity to your principles can sometimes come into conflict with their personal relationships) to those that entail physical decline (in one story, Teresa Pàmies’s editor refuses to publish some of her latest writings due to their poor quality). This autumn tone brings cohesion to a collection that has an author in full power, Pàmies and his acid-but-not-corrosive style, with his attitude of providing perspective and relativizing even the most imminent tragedy, a kind of pole opposed to some writers a little more parduzcosis always capable of lifting the text, always providing a light (not frivolous) and hopeful counterpoint. Even in writings that speak of maturity, old age, decadence and even a certain melancholy, there is a current of perplexity, surprise, amazement at the inflexibility of the passage of time, which is optimistic, fresh and gratifying.

More books by Sergi Pàmies at ULAD: here