2023-12-16 07:30:57
“My work is crazy, but here I’ve slowed down”acknowledges the teacher and writer Damià Bardera (Viladamat, 1982). The author from Emporda redoubles its bet on the absurd a The curtain opensa collection of short stories in theatrical format starring the “grotesque and subhuman” characters that have populated his work for years. In Bardera’s impossible theater there are dialogues and characters, even dimensions and spectators, but because of the scenarios and actions he proposes, the narratives “are unrepresentable, because, above all, they are stories”.
Although the writer had already touched this format with some theatrical stories in titles like The sack men (2012) o The sack kids (2013), now takes a step further with about forty texts in which “the level of absurdity has reached alarming heights”.
«I wrote the book with the conviction of failure, thinking that it’s not that I won’t find readers, it’s that I might not even have a publisher“, continues.
Published with The Second Periphery, The curtain opens and his most ambitious book – “or the most kamikaze”, he points out –, a project that he had had in mind for a long time, but kept postponing because of “the spiritual involvement it required”. Six years ago he became unemployed and took it as “a gift”, an opportunity to make progress on a short but very well-worked book, because “every word is very measured”.
“Until I finished one story, I didn’t start another one, and it was a complicated part, because I ended up doing a dozen versions of some stories. Finding the words for all the possible senses to explode and the reverberation I was looking for has been a complicated process. Writing this is exhausting, because it’s been like an obsession,” he says.
The result is one book with a theatrical form but a narrative spirit that collides -“the reader tells me that they are surprised, but the truth is that I was also surprised when I wrote it”- and that it is out of place, because it is so difficult to classify that in some bookstores they even place it in the section of theater
They star him “schematic and sketchy characters, not designed for the reader to identify with”with an author who, like a puppeteer, moves the threads through underline the absurdity, the sordidness and even, the point of existentialism, bringing to the limit a universe that has been building in a literary career very well received by critics, but still little known by the public and which includes translations into English, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Croatian or Spanish.
With the publishing house El Cep i la Nansa, he has published six books of stories, a novel and a newspaper essay. In Viena Edicions, a collection of poems, in Núvol, an essay, and in Emboscall, another. His most recent titles are, with Empúries, the anthology of short stories A circus in the backyard and Petsabout the educational world, published last year by Godall.
Those who already knew the work of Damià Bardera will not see The curtain opens like a discontinuity, in any case a variation: “I couldn’t have written this book without having done all the previous ones, because I always have the feeling that I’m writing about the same thing, but I don’t know what I’m writing about. I see this whole world as projections of my unconscious world: traumas, complexes, half-baked characters and those who lack a batch… and those who don’t!’
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