Alex Milian: The Curse of Short Fiction

Nobel Prize in Literature is one month away Annie Ernaux He was in Barcelona for two days and demonstrated the power of attraction that literature still has for young people. Tickets for the event, held on Tuesday 11 June at the Jaume Fuster Library in Barcelona, sold out within five minutes of going on sale (online, about 10 days before). A large number of readers – the vast majority of them women and young people in particular – lined up despite the rain and wind. The following day, the French writer repeated the session in which she had starred in Film Library in Cataloniain the largest room. The success of the call also surprised Filmoteca’s management.Esteve Riambau He admitted it to EL TEMPS in this interview) and even more so the composition of the audience: very feminine and very young. Riambau himself explained that he commented on this detail for the Nobel Prize in Literature and Ernaux replied that this happens wherever he goes: “C’est mon public”.

Ernaux has reached a global audience, not just female and young people – although this is the crowd that most often gathers when she appears in public – thanks to what the French call News (Very short books), containing a very large amount of autobiography but above all containing an extraordinary and recognizable dose of truth and honesty. They are not memoirs skilfully edited to have literary value, to achieve a rounded ending, or to transform the memoirist into the protagonist of the novel’s life. Ernaux manages to leave the reader in no doubt about the profound truth of what he explains. Perhaps because she is weak, insecure, or fragile; perhaps because he simply opens up and shows himself with an open heart. She herself explains that she was very ashamed to publish the first novel because of what her mother, her husband, and her acquaintances might think.

The extraordinary fact is that Ernaux has achieved this literary miracle with novels that rarely reach a hundred pages. No more. frozen woman 176 more than them donut It is 88 pages in a not at all narrow font in the Catalan edition of Angle Editorial; Place96; pure passion72; the event96 I My home is48!

It may seem counterintuitive, but in today’s publishing industry, this has a lot of advantages. A novel has to be almost a masterpiece to be published. News From this extension. Unfortunately, literary prizes also encourage expansion as a kind of “literary value.”

In our linguistic field, none of these novels by the hypothetical Catalan-speaking Erno could have won any major literary prize. It is likely that none of the novels Tmysterious Dr’Eva Balthazar (permafrost, boulder I mammoth) which received so much appreciation here and abroad would not have been accepted for literary awards in the country.

he Saint Jordi Award Requires at least 100 sheets of paper with 2100 characters per sheet. (210,000 characters). Andromeda It talks about 100 pages but does not specify a minimum number of characters per page. Arch He is not talking about characters but about pages, 150, which is certainly more than what Sant Jordi asks for. BBVA San Juan230,000 minimum. etc… It only supports short stories. Just a homemade prize Because it is specifically designed to output short works (150,000 and 230,000 characters).

This is nothing new, and it’s time to acknowledge the absurdity of this standard.

We remember that forty years ago. Maria Barbal He had to submit his first novel – The Extraordinary Novel. pebble stone– The Joaquim Royra Prize for Young People’s Literature for not having received sufficient extension to the Sant Jordi Prize.

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