Bruno Blog

(the tortoise that escaped from the jaguar)

One morning, on a Caribbean beach, a hawksbill turtle appears dead. They say it was killed by a jaguar. When Marilia hears the news, she mysteriously resolves that it’s time to leave home. She leaves behind Aunt Granada and the enigmatic Jason, who catches fishes for her. After bidding farewell to the Demon of the Dock, a being who is mocked by everyone in the village, she begins a journey that will take her through exotic landscapes, of which perhaps the most important is her own past, the only way to understand her present. Thus, she will discover a secret that will push her to make the most risky decision of her life, in a fight to the death between the two most overwhelming forces of human nature: fear and desire.

Octavi Fontseca está en crisis: su matrimonio se desmorona y es incapaz de escribir. Apenas queda rastro del escritor que transformó toda la rabia que sentía por una infancia rota en una novela que lo erigió como la voz de una generación.Han pasado treinta años de todo aquello, y Octavi sigue viviendo de un pasado que ya no existe. Su editor se impacienta y le propone publicar con su nombre un manuscrito que nunca escribió. Una mañana, dos policías le informan de que su madre, que le había abandonado cuando era pequeño, ha aparecido muerta. La autopsia revela que antes de morir se tragó una piedra; una piedra que encierra secretos y recuerdos de una vida largo tiempo olvidada.

We all have a reason to fall. What’s yours?

Octavi Fontseca is in crisis: his marriage is crumbling and he is unable to move past his writer’s block.
There is hardly a trace of the writer who transformed all the rage he felt because of a broken childhood into a novel that erected him as the voice of a generation. Thirty years have passed since then, and Octavi continues to live from a past that no longer exists.
His publisher becomes impatient and suggests that he publishes under his name a manuscript that he has not written. One morning, two policemen inform him that his mother, who had abandoned him when he was little, has been found dead. The autopsy reveals that before she died, she swallowed a stone; a stone that holds secrets and memories of a long-forgotten life.

Excerpt from the book:
“There are people who drink to cheer themselves up, to forget everything. He drinks to remember, to sink more into the blackness that he carries within and that blackens everything. It was in that state that he wrote Eye for an Eye and The Love That Awaits Us, and since then, it seems to him that in that hole is his true self. It is the only part of him that is worthwhile. This, at the same time, frightens him. You can’t live swimming in a glass of whiskey, they say. He drinks and refills the glass.”

Macondo Beach is a collection of short stories by Sebastià Bennassar, with the sea as the element that brings them all together. Therefore, we will discover writers caught in the Athlantic and Mediterranean beaches; stories close to the black novel, stories of shipwrecks that are not what they seem and even the characters turn themselves into islands, islands in an archipelago of dreams and desires. In short, a gateway to the world of one of the most prolific and singular narrators of contemporary Catalan narrative.

VIII Narrativa Marítima Vila de Cambrils Josep Lluís Savall Prize 2018