last night i attended this event in the pen world voices weekend. i have passed the lillian vernon writer’s house before, unaware; it was quite a startling entrance–i walked in with the audience facing me. yikes! and me without my party dress on.
it was stiflingly warm; josep fonalleras’ ears turned a vicious red by the time we got to the single question and multiple answer session. (give us insight into your reason and influences for writing.) i preferred merce ibarz’s story–it was dreamy, and then it startled–and the reader for both fonalleras and francesc seres’ stories was overly theatrical to the detriment of the purpose of the story. he read as if each word had some significance, but the whole story did not.
i talked afterward to mary ann newman, director of the catalan center at nyu, about studying the language and about the lack of catalan literature translated into english (merce rodoreda, whose novel la placa del diamante i have just finished teaching, is one of the few authors with multiple works in english). there is however, a volume of new stories published by dalkey archive. go here to find it. each of the authors i have just mentioned is published in it.
