Today it can be said out loud. Very high. And with all the letters of the alphabet and all possible exclamations. Vicenç Pagès has been (is!) one of the most brilliant, intelligent, prolific, polyhedral and robust writers of my generation. Perhaps the most and most likely of more than a generation, from the end of the 80s until this damn day in August in which he has transferred, right in the middle of the Torroella festivities, the town of his adoption. It could be said before, of course, but now, unfortunately, it is a conclusive, definitive statement. And there, yes, the topic is valid. With the death of Vicenç, friend, fellow juror, colleague of a few adventures, Catalan literature loses a capital bastion, a touchstone. For many reasons: because of his undeniable quality and because, above all, Vicenç was a tireless and incorruptible reader, who I had all the literature (and not just Catalan) in my head, which was capable of distinguishing, defining, establishing canons and codes. This is not easy. One can be a writer and that’s enough (that is, create more or less plausible fictional universes), but at a higher stage there are those who think about their profession and reflect from the original condition of reader, that is, passionate lover.
It’s hard to write these lines. They have just told me through many different channels, all the friends with whom we have shared the intellectual splendor of Vicenç. Sometimes I disagreed with him (sometimes strongly), but there always remained, in the discussion, in the discrepancy, an absolute respect for him, for someone who was so capable of putting together a short novel as intense as ‘Letter to the Queen d’Anglaterra’ and some novels such as ‘Els whist players’ or the initiatory and emotional ‘Dies de Frontera’. That he could talk about smells and bad smells in literature, that he understood better than anyone else the importance of what we have called children’s literature, that he immersed himself, with humor and distance, with an English touch and at the same time from Figueres, in the ‘Memòria vintage’.
I left so many titles. The ones we already know about and one that Ernest Folch will publish shortly under the title ‘Kennedyana’, Vicenç’s latest novelty, a literary portrait of narrative non-fiction. He left me so many. We will have time to go deep into his legacy. Now we only have desolation and grief at hand. We live, a few, in a state of shock. We knew the seriousness of the disease, but he himself encouraged us discreetly: “I appreciate these words, Josep Maria”. And nothing more. Vicenç was discreet and polite, apparently a distant, orderly and precise man. His literature sometimes conveys that perception. But, at the same time, as soon as you scratch, no matter how little confidence you had, displayed a devastating irony, an incisive humor, and, at the same time, a kindness that could only be based on trust in certain values that he assumed and that focus on the need to be loyal to the principles, to the supreme good that is hidden in the men and women who have written and that we have read.
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He was one of us, to put it like a good friend of his just told me. And the curious thing about it all, now that I think about it, is that the most academic rigor, the most fussy, only responded to one objective. Play. Play with words, with lists, with true stories and lies.
Vicenç was a man who played, now I see himwhile I listen to Antònia Font in a house in the middle of the forest, without knowing much what to say, without knowing how to react yet.