“Parcerisas has the serene prose of a wise spirit.”
Jordi Amat, La Vanguardia

“Parcerisas excels at giving voice to pleasures and moods. He describes sensations, memories, and thoughts that overlap in a disorderly, harmonious way.”
Vicenç Pagès Jordà, El Periódico de Catalunya

“Parcerisas’ writing is clear, diaphanous, precise. It is full of details that give consistency to his descriptions. His images, like the clouds he watches unravelling, illuminate life’s minutiae.”
Maria Dasca, El País

“La tardor em sobta is reflection that links up with observations about the cultural crisis we are living through. Intellectually brilliant and honest.”
Julià Guillamon, La Vanguardia

“A refined, exquisite diary that speaks of the surprises with which life keeps presenting him. Francesc Parcerisas is one of the doyens of Catalan literature.”
Santi Borrell, El Punt Avui

“A defence of the fragment as a “symbolic generator”, a philosophy of quilting, of metonymy as an activity of the intense gaze that is writing. Parcerisas is a gracious, accessible storyteller.”
David Vidal Castell, Ara

La tardor em sobta is a diary in which Francesc Parcerisas ponders the fragmentation of experience, and the modern impossibility of making sense of the whole. If, for Stendhal, “a novel is a mirror carried along a high road”, the texts coming together in this book are nothing more than bits of mirrors that Parcerisas has painstakingly gathered along many waysides: thoughts, readings, annotations, quotations, sketches, and more. These are chipped or elusive fragments that suddenly reveal crucial parts of meaning because they hide, beneath words that often fail us, the curiosity with which Parcerisas has always gazed upon life, or that of life’s gaze upon him, twinkling like a distant lighthouse in the night. These morsels give him the opportunity to imaginatively reconstruct—as he previously did with La primavera a Pequín (2013) and Un estiu (2018)—the part of the whole to which they may have once belonged, like fleeting glimmers of the life story we are always rewriting.

Francesc Parcerisas (b. Begues, 1944) is a poet, translator and critic. His first poems were published in Triumph of the Present: Poems, 1965-1983. In Quaderns Crema he has published The Golden Age, October Fires, Still Life with Children, Two More South Days, Sixty-One Poems, and Shadow and Light (written together with Anton Marí), as well as the diaries Spring in Peking (winner of the Llibreter Prize) and One Summer. He has worked as Professor of Translation at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and has acted as Director and Dean of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes. He has been awarded the National Prize for Culture and the Jaume Fuster Prize of the Association of Writers in Catalan.