Tríptic de la terra

When Mercè Ibarz published La Tierra Retired in 1993, she opened a path that has not failed to bear fruit for narrative in Catalan. "Autobiographical chronicle of a country", in the words of Joan Triadú, "invaluable testimony", in it Ibarz evoked the social, economic and landscape changes that the management of active farmland can bring to a territory: in this case, his hometown, Saidí, in the Strip. The book quickly became "an indisputable classic of Catalan literature of the last quarter of the 20th century", as critic Julià Guillamon put it. After two years, Ibarz wrote the fictionalized version, The Wheat Palm, starring a young journalist who returns to town for three days to attend the funeral of her centenarian grandfather. It is a novel of rare beauty, full of indelible images, in which, like someone following a set of clues (sometimes very tangible, sometimes only intuited or dreamed of), the protagonist revives the memory of her corner of the world, of their living and their dead. More than twenty-five years later, Mercè Ibarz resumed the cycle in Labor unfinished to give shape to this Triptych of the Earth. Once again in the chronicle in the first person, with fragments of photographic essay, the author continues, with renewed expressive freedom, her comings and goings between the borders of literary genres to verify to what extent the stories, the history, begin to tell themselves and over the years it is discovered that they never end.