Translation Rights TQE / A slow day

Nicolau Batet, submitted to the energy of his mistakes, wants to escape from the cobwebbed ruins of the city where he lives and decides to visit his birthplace, a coastal town. His excuse for the trip is an invitation to the wedding anniversary of some friends from his youth, but from the moment he arrives, he becomes very much aware that everything has changed, that nothing can remain as it was during the age of illusion. There is, however, something that ties all of them together: everyone’s unending thirst. The adventures, both banal and extraordinary, of Nicolau Batet and his friends create a strange atmosphere that will affect everyone’s mood as the absence of the hostess on her glory day becomes truly worrying. On this day, Nicolau Batet will come to accept that to live is to persistently abolish a memory. Un día tranquil is a happy novel about failure.

Ponç Puigdevall (1963) has worked for many years as a literary critic for the newspapers El Punt and El País. In 1990 he won the Andròmina Prize for Un silenci sec (A dry silence), and in 1998 he published the acclaimed Era un secret (It was a secret). He has recently been awarded the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona (Barcelona Prize) for Un día tranquil.

Praise for Un dia tranquil:

“There is nothing fake in this book. Puigdevall is able to maintain, for pages on end, the tone of a great tale.”

La Vanguardia

“Ponç Puigdevall is back with a novel that brings together the prose of Juan Benet and the hallucinatory urgency of Malcolm Lowry. Un día tranquil satisfies the readers’ expectations.” El Periódico de Catalunya

”The novel is the systematic and raw X-ray – sharp and full, mature and dark, sinister and brilliant – of a man’s self-destruction when he is trapped in “the age of illusion”. This powerful novel is truly extravagant, a ticking time bomb in Catalan literature.” El País

“A hugely ambitious novel that seems as banal at first as David Lynch’s The Straight Story.” Avui