Institut Ramon LLull

This slim, an intimate volume of thirteen stories explores paternal, filial, and spousal love (disappointment, nostalgia and panic too) through a narrator who bemoans his inability to wear a trench coat well, and who finally accuses himself of being “pusillanimous.” Yet in these encounters and these endings, in these details and these feelings, a compassionate, small portrait of a life emerges. Terse, droll, sometimes absurd but always lucid, Pàmies casts his gaze on the urge to write as seen through his mother’s final days; on his teenage fantasy that his father was actually Jorge Semprún; and on situations such as adopting a dog to staunch a failing marriage, or a father asked to play the part of a corpse in his son’s short film. In this phantasmagoria of failure and loss, Pàmies confronts us —drawing us in with his use of the second person address— with the omnipresence of well-intentioned lies despite which it may be impossible to ever make anyone else happy.