La madre ballena y otros cuentos

I like to imagine Caterina Albert and Paradís, real name of Víctor Català, as part of a brotherhood of unusual women of which Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Mercè Rodoreda and many others. Women who wrote in a man's world, who imagined strategies to carry on with their daily activities despite the difficulties, who paid for their daring with lonely lives, different, still mysterious today, far removed from most women of his time Authors who baffled, scandalized or frightened most men of their time, including, of course, their intellectual colleagues, especially those who boasted the most about their status. [...] His words, expressions and attention to detail transport us to a bygone Catalonia, largely gone, which contrasts with the subjects he focuses on, so ahead of their time that they seem taken from a parliamentary session just yesterday, or from a list of social chakras that we, the inhabitants of the first quarter of the 21st century, have had to live through. And the fact is that Víctor Català's stories seem to have been written for today's readers rather than for those of the late 19th or early 20th centuries.