The 9 key books not to forget the writer Josep Maria Espinàs

‘To the table of the others. A peu pel Priorat”

After his first trip on foot to Pallars and the Vall d’Aran, even with some descriptive excesses in the face of the monumental landscape, Espinàs refined his formula on the second try and with this he created what he came to define as “his own genre”. The dialogues between a gentleman from Barcelona and the reclusive local population exude absurd humour. Over the years, the Priorat of 1957 -when uprooting vines was a job with a better future than harvesting them, its wines were famous for vinacho, two Andalusian immigrants in pants were in the news and finding an inn where they served a stranger, an odyssey – is already unrecognizable.

‘An articulated life’

It is something more than an anthology of the best articles by Josep Maria Espinàs published between 1976 and 2012. Espinàs saw it as the book he wanted “to stay”. Arranged chronologically, the columns were edited to remove repetitive passages or unnecessarily referring to an already irrelevant context. Without politics, personalities, what remains is life, commented with a placid humor and vindicative of the concrete, the sensory, the everyday.

‘Inventory of retirements’

The closest thing to an autobiography of Espinàs. Written at the age of 65, when he remembers that as a writer turning out does not lead to retirement from work. And indeed, he would still have almost 30 years of writing ahead of him. All his subsequent biographical sketchbooks are distillations (thematic, or refinement of style) of this book, in which there is still a long time to be lived and episodes appear on which he preferred not to insist later, such as his fleeting political foray into the elections of 1980.

‘The name is Olga’

Not just a book, rather a social phenomenon. Espinàs’s was the first generation of parents who shared the experience of being in charge of a child with some difficulty instead of -something that today seems inconceivable- hiding it. An act of love in force despite the time that has passed since its publication in 1986. The temporal distance, on the other hand, also reminds us to what extent aspects such as the labor integration of people with Down syndrome or terminology have been transformed.

‘A rhythm of the temps. Notes of a life

One of the aspects of Espinàs’s prose is rhythm. In one of the many interviews that we have published with him over the years in EL PERIÓDICO, precisely on the occasion of the publication of this book, we asked him if he thought he “had swing” and, jazz fan as he is, it seems that he concept liked. His insistence that the texts have rhythm and melody led him to the extreme of writing brief biographical episodes in the form of almost free verse.

‘He officiated’

Espinàs explains the steps he followed in his career, breaks down his thoughts on literature and defines his (relative) ambitions as a writing professional: “I have been living and writing helped by some and various ambitions, always small, those that do not harm or to the liver or the brain. Simply, to write as well as possible without forcing who I am, not to feel an adversary of the other writers, that there are enough readers of a book to justify its publication, that the critics say what they like or not Say nothing, that you don’t need a position to live -nor, above all, to influence-, and to be able to smile in an intellectual and educated way thinking of those who have, they do, the ambition to dictate literary sentences”.

‘Private relations’

Six collections of anecdotes arising from contact with as many writers: Salvador Espriu, JV Foix, Miguel Delibes, Josep Pla, Camilo José Cela (on the deck carrying Espinàs during their trip through the Lleida Pyrenees) and Josep Maria de Sagarra . The chapter dedicated to Foix is ​​an amusing complaint about poets who persecute others by insisting on reading their verses aloud, the one dedicated to Cela shows some weaknesses and impostures behind the image of the Galician as an ogre and the observer’s experiences with Josep Pla , a young and shy member of the Destino circle, portray him in his contradictory relationship with facts, good education and gastronomy.

‘Between the readers and jo’

Josep Maria Espinàs answered the very few letters he received throughout his career. But yes, he explains, I take advantage of them. “This compilation is proof of the enrichment that readers’ correspondence entails. Without the questions that have been raised, without the personal concerns that have been entrusted to me, and also without the critical opinions about what I have written, I had missed many stimuli to concretize some ideas”.

‘Our daily objects’

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A delicious book and unfortunately not republished, but one that says a lot about Espinàs’ writing (and about how many things have changed in our daily lives since he wrote it in 1981). A “little ironic and sentimental dictionary” in which he is able to make the most of a series of objects as banal as the clothespins, the nightstand, the handkerchief (when paper ones were a novelty), the telephone (when he denounced the authoritarianism of the object that forced us to go to a place with its bells) or “the portrait machine” when it was still called “the portrait machine”.