The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat

"The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat is a collection of 13 short stories. Sergi Pàmies is a master of short story writing in Catalonia, the reference in contemporary short story writing. He’s a journalist. He’s very well known in media like TV, radio, newspapers. He writes about all kinds of things and he’s amusing writing about football or not very deep subjects, but when it comes to his short stories, he has something similar to Marta Orriols in the sense of being apparently quite detached from what he’s talking about, which in this book is very much him. He’s writing about events of his life. He’s put it as a fiction book, and you will find it on fiction shelves, but everyone in Catalonia knows it’s him. The English reader will also understand that it’s about him, taking elements here and there to make a fictional story. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He puts the focus on the unpleasant events, but it’s anecdotal as well. There’s one story where the protagonist is supposed to be in a film. His son is making a film at film school and the protagonist is going to be the dead body in the film. They carry him away. But while he is pretending to be dead he has a heart attack and he dies in the story. Then he narrates the rest of the story dead, saying ‘I was telling them I was dying. My son, the only thing he could say was to carry on filming.’ It’s humorous, quite absurd, quite dark but he’s also very tender, very sweet. You feel for the characters, you feel empathy. Sergi Pàmies is very much an author of what could be considered the Catalan generation of democracy. In the 1940s and 50s, many Catalan authors were writing in Spanish as Catalan language was suppressed. Pàmies was born in the 60s, in exile in France, and his mother was Catalan, a quite renowned writer in Spain, so he does make something of his Catalan identity. As far as I know, he has always been writing in Catalan, one of the first well-known authors writing in Catalan of his generation. Also, in his books, he writes a lot about Barcelona, the streets, the corners, the food, the daily life. He’s almost hyperrealistic in his books and they are set in Barcelona most of the time, so I would say yes."