The Mot de literatura festival has left Girona, but it is not over yet: it will resume on Thursday, already in Olot, where it will last until next Saturday. The stay in Girona culminated this evening at the Carles Rahola library, with the Italian writer Massimo Carlotto recounting how the accusation of murder that fell on him has marked his literature. Shortly before, in the afternoon, Andreu Martín and Youssef El Maimouni, two authors of stories that revolve around violence and revenge, spoke about Urban and Peripheral Terror.
The Sabbath activities began hours earlier, in the morning and in Vista Alegre park, with the traditional Ver-Mot and the commented reading of We’ll be lucky tomorrow, the novelized biography of Joan Pacheco, a neighborhood resident who lived the experience of exile, by author Núria Martí and actor David Planas. Next, Núria Cadenes, Fátima Llambrich and Marc Pastor talked about the black Time.news a Reality overcomes fiction?. The talk was moderated by the journalist Maika Navarro, who resigned early from her role to become another contertulian. As was to be expected in a question that has been asked for centuries, no agreement has been reached, but Marc Pastor has given some hint: “fiction must have a certain coherence, and reality does not”. For Llambrich, moreover, “fiction loses the subtlety of evil that reality does have”.
El Ver-Mot has had moments as little criminal as Maika Navarro’s confessing that minutes earlier she had asked Fátima Llambrich if “Marc Pastor carries a cock (sic) in his backpack”. Fortunately, it turned out not to be such an extremity but another: a finger, and not a real one but a rubber one, which the policeman has hanging in his bag as a tribute to the investigation of fingerprints, which is his specialty.
It remains as proof that those attending the Ver-Mot were not very criminal, that when Navarro asked anyone who had ever killed someone or had at least thought about doing it to raise their hand, none of them took off. “At least a couple would have risen in Olot”, replied Pastor, with a police sense of smell.
Forty-five authors and artists have spoken in Girona from March 16 to 18 and will do so in Olot from 23 to 25 on topics such as phobias, pain or anxiety to “fill as many fear boxes as possible”. El Mot is a literary festival – jointly organized by the town councils of Girona Olot – that takes place every year during the spring. Each year he chooses a thematic area that serves as a common thread, which in this ninth edition is “Panic, literature and fear”.
Olot will take over the festival on March 23 with the conversation May we not be overcome by fear, in which Lolita Bosch and Josep Maria Miró will address the theme of the Word from an essayistic and theatrical point of view. After several events in Olot for three days, the festival will end on the 25th. In the afternoon, Marta Sanz and Jorge Volpi will deal with the theme of fear from their socially engaged literature and end the ninth edition of Mot Bonnie Jo Campbell and Carlos Zanón talking about the fear of failure.