Connecting with a wide audience and being recognized by critics is one of the values of the Catalan writer Imma Monso (Lleida, 1959), who in the words of Vicens Pagès “has written some of the best novels in Catalan literature” of recent years. The herald of the reading of Sant Jordi 2022, an honor that she has shared with Saramago, Antonio Tabucchi, Raimon, Donna Leon John Banville, Claudio Magris, Josep Maria Castellet, Almudena Grandes or Yasmina Reza, who have been in the 20 years that are celebrated now since the creation of the tradition, he showed some of his best characteristics in the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council: his ability to play, his disbelief and a particular humor that he is able to combine in the same paragraph with the most absolute desolation .
The proclamation, which actually takes the form of a conversation, this time with the journalist Anna Guitart, was preceded by an orderly succession of memories that led the author of ‘Tot un caracter’ and ‘Un home de paraula’ to evoke herself from a very young age, when she saw her father read in silence and, without her knowing how to read yet, later pretending that that book full of letters spoke to her. “I kept turning the pages thinking that the light would come on, but nothing happened & rdquor ;.
love for libraries
In the Mequinenza where she spent her early years there were no libraries, there were in Lleida where she grew up and her next frustration was that although her parents took her to the movies, the circus or the fairs and gave her stories, they did not respond to the request of the girl to go to a library for seeming like a bizarre whim. The first of hers was stepped on at the school where her grandmother worked, where the Ministry of Education and Science had sent a collection of books, among which was ‘El camino’ by Delibes, ‘El Jarama’ by Sánchez Ferlosio and ‘Nada’ by Carmen Laforet. “That novel left a void in my heart that I still feel when it passed through Aribau Street & rdquor ;. Later, at 14, the readings in Catalan came to the library of the Lleida institute: Mercè Rodoreda, Pere Quart, Pere Calders, Ausias March, Teresa Pamies and access to classics like Moliere, Zola, Ionesco, Beckett, and Boris Vian.
At 17, the author no longer wanted to borrow books, she wanted to make them her own, buy them and own them. “In bookstores she didn’t want to look at the synopsis because I wasn’t interested in what was being told. I wanted to know how she told herself, how she breathed writing. I spent my pay on books & rdquor ;.
Inner voice
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How the reader became a writer owes much to access to the computer, a mechanism that allowed her to adapt to her dizzying inner voice, a speed that in the early days had left many texts unfinished. In 1996 she wrote her first novel ‘No se sap mai’ which was based on a unique premise: a man finds a bottle of wine that allows him to temporarily exchange his personality with someone who wants to share that experience with him. “For me that idea is a perfect metaphor for reading, a book is a bottle that allows you to live many lives & rdquor ;.
How does a novel begin in the author’s mind? It varies from book to book. “In the case of ‘Un home de paraula’ written as a result of mourning the death of my partner, I wrote because I needed it for myself. Until one day I managed to distance myself from the text and saw that there was beauty there, that’s when I thought it could be a book.” The author, who she has recently signed by Anagrama, is currently writing a book about female insecurity set between 1950 and 1962 that explores the perspective of how women have transformed from then to now. She has really enjoyed writing it and it is possible that it will appear in 2023 but as the author usually says with that humor of hers. She has always tried “not to be happy for a long time & rdquor ;.