{"id":605,"date":"2021-04-09T12:24:44","date_gmt":"2021-04-09T10:24:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/news-24-lorem-ipsum-dolor\/"},"modified":"2021-11-29T12:37:07","modified_gmt":"2021-11-29T11:37:07","slug":"news-24-lorem-ipsum-dolor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/news-24-lorem-ipsum-dolor\/","title":{"rendered":"'The Art of\u00a0Wearing a Trench Coat'\u00a0at Pop Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sergi P\u00e0mies' short story collection The Art of\u00a0Wearing a Trench Coat <\/em>evokes introspection.<\/h4>\n

Spanish writer Sergi P\u00e0mies\u2019 story collection, The Art of\u00a0Wearing a Trench Coat<\/em>, draws readers into deep,\u00a0psychologically dense first-person narratives.<\/p>\n

\"\"There is a card game\u00a0popular in the\u00a0Canadian East Coast\u00a0where I grew up,\u00a0called 120s. It\u2019s the sort of game\u00a0where players compete using an\u00a0arcane (and endlessly disputed)\u00a0set of rules to win tricks, which\u00a0drives their score either up or\u00a0down. The first player to reach 120\u00a0points wins.<\/p>\n

There is, however, a second way to\u00a0win the game. If a player loses so\u00a0many points that their score dips\u00a0into the negative, they might\u00a0decide to try \u2018going out the back door\u2019 \u2013 losing points so badly that they hit\u00a0negative 120. At this stage, other players switch tactics and cooperate to try\u00a0to force thay player\u2019s score to rise.<\/p>\n

I sometimes find myself thinking of this game as a metaphor for emotional\u00a0writing. There are two ways to really hit the reader in the feels, so to speak.\u00a0There\u2019s the contemporary approach popularized by writers like\u00a0Hemingway, Murakami, and countless others. Their writing is sparse,\u00a0comprised of short sentences, stripped of affect, using the bare minimum\u00a0of words to invoke feeling in the reader. By stripping away excess, these\u00a0writers empty the imaginary landscape of their reader\u2019s mind, rendering it\u00a0a blank palette on which to sketch their sparse imagery. The lack of\u00a0superfluous detail or psychological pretense allows the practitioner of this\u00a0method to tap directly into the reader\u2019s emotional consciousness; their\u00a0short sentences and bare phrases resonate with the reader\u2019s emotional\u00a0landscape by virtue of emptying that landscape of distractions.<\/p>\n

The other method \u2013 sort of like going out the back door in 120s \u2013 is to lay\u00a0on the florid prose with such unrelenting vigour that the reader is swept\u00a0away. Against the flood of descriptive verbiage, the reader has no defense:\u00a0not all of it will hit close to home, but there\u2019s enough packed in that at least\u00a0some of it is sure to hit its target. The trick lies in the balance: enough direct\u00a0hits and the reader will think their author a genius and forget the misses;\u00a0too few and the reader will think the writer a pretentious bore.<\/p>\n

Spanish author Sergi P\u00e0mies is one of those rare writers who, more often than not, hits his\u00a0target. (Translator Adrian Nathan West deserves props for fluidly translating such challenging prose). P\u00e0mies\u2019 style\u00a0is unapologetically florid, full of dense prose constructions that, with a\u00a0lesser writer, would seem forced and contrived. But P\u00e0mies is enough of an\u00a0artisan to craft his words in such a way that they work.<\/p>\n

Like anyone who dabbles in complex, erudite writing, he has his share of\u00a0misses too. When one luxuriates in paragraph-long sentences, it\u2019s all but\u00a0inevitable that you will sometimes lose the bewildered reader (who\u00a0nevertheless suspects that something intelligent is going on, even if it\u2019s\u00a0over their head). But P\u00e0mies pays attention to his wordcraft and the reader\u00a0finds themselves caught in the flow of deep, psychologically dense firstperson\u00a0narratives. They\u2019re not just understanding it, but enjoying the ride\u00a0as well.<\/p>\n

P\u00e1mies\u2019 style is sophisticated, but greatest skill is his ability to provoke\u00a0emotional resonance in the reader, crafting a story in such a way as to\u00a0evoke a particular emotional or psychological state of mind. The\u00a0whimsically belaboured title \u201cOutline of a Lecture For a Hypothetical\u00a0Conference of Divorcees\u201d presages a reflection on failed relationships.\u00a0(Struggling relationships and fading love is a persistent theme in this\u00a0collection.) It delivers hit after emotional hit, accurately revealing the sorts\u00a0of doubts and fears that routinely characterize romantic attachments and\u00a0inevitably undermine them.<\/p>\n

The vicissitudes of age and a parent\u2019s growing sense of irrelevance is\u00a0another recurring theme in stories like \u201cPlease\u201d, \u201cPaternity\u201d and \u201cBelarus\u201d.\u00a0In the latter, a father takes his children to a dog pound; the children sense\u00a0their parents\u2019 relationship is on the rocks, and believe that adopting a dog\u00a0would improve things. In the former, an aging father has been asked to act\u00a0as an extra in his son\u2019s film. He lurks around the set, ignored and waiting for\u00a0his big moment.<\/p>\n

In all these stories the protagonist evinces a sense of lackadaisical\u00a0helplessness, watching as events happen around them. It\u2019s a very human\u00a0condition that P\u00e1mies has honed into an art form. He offers a whimsical\u00a0nod to this approach in the story \u201cMother-Son Christmas Carol\u201d. The theme\u00a0is inspired by his mother\u2019s adage that \u201cthe advantage of being a writer was\u00a0that everything that happened to you could be turned into literature,\u00a0sooner or later.\u201d The entire book is, in a way, an homage to this principle.\u00a0We may be helpless in the face of life\u2019s undesired turns and failed dreams,\u00a0but at least we can write about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 9\/11 Story Nobody Asked Me To Write\u201d, while set in the immediate\u00a0aftermath of 9\/11, reads like a parable for our own pandemic age. Upon\u00a0reading about the attacks on the news, the author becomes convinced they\u00a0are the prelude to an apocalypse and immediately sets out to find and\u00a0hoard medicines for his chronically ill son. Unable to process the scale and\u00a0horror of the tragedy he sees on the news, \u201cI turn my attention to a single,\u00a0monstrously selfish, but effective goal: thinking of how we ourselves might\u00a0be affected by the appearance of chaos in the world\u2026Overlooking the\u00a0planetary significance of what\u2019s happening, I transform my son into the\u00a0epicenter of history.\u201d The breathless, panicked effort to collect medicines\u00a0from every pharmacy possible offers a reflection on the \u201cdirect relation\u00a0between pure, universal panic and my own apprehension: so irrelevant, so\u00a0specific, so selfish, and yet so real.\u201d How many of us would confess to\u00a0similar strains of thought from the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic?<\/p>\n

The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat<\/em> \u00a0is an excellent collection,\u00a0eminently enjoyable and soaked in the rich emotionally descriptive vigour\u00a0of P\u00e1mies\u2019 prose. It forces the reader to reckon with human helplessness,\u00a0whether we want to or not, offering introspective insights of the sort many\u00a0of us would probably prefer not to have. But that\u2019s the point of literature.\u00a0Yet P\u00e1mies sparks feeling in the reader, and sometimes that\u2019s enough to\u00a0remind us of our own fraught and fragile humanity.<\/p>\n

Pop Matters<\/a>, by Rhea\u00a0Rollmann (19 April 2021)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sergi P\u00e0mies' short story collection The Art of\u00a0Wearing a Trench Coat evokes introspection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2078,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2074,"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions\/2074"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rights-acantiladoqc.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}