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
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