Llorenç Villalonga often walked around the quiet and noble neighborhood of Palma.
The neighbourhood is venerable, noble and hushed, with small streets and huge houses, which seem empty. Between the eaves of the houses, the sky trembles with its extreme blue. Grass grows in the gaps between stones, as big as slabs. Silence is broken, every now and then, by the sound of bells. [...] On the other side of the city, on the outskirts, in El Terreno, in Gènova, there is a heaving colonial world, comprising artists, tourists and ladies who smoke. They are strange people, who swim in the winter and turn their backs on religion. They make devilish cocktails. They hold dances and teas. The old neighbourhood pretends to ignore them. With neither the bravery nor will to declare war on them, they instead choose to declare they do not exist.
Mort de dama (1931)
Translated by Richard Mansell.
(Palma, 1897 – 1980). Llorenç Villalonga is considered one of the foremost novelists of Catalan literature. An assiduous attendee of literary discussions at the end of the 20th century, writer of opinion articles, novelist and dramatist, he defied genre conventions and created a solid and unitary work, with constant interrelations between characters, settings and correspondences between fact and fiction. His work introduces the modern novel to the Catalan language, as seen in the European referents that allowed him to rise above the literature of local customs and traditions that was in vogue. In his writing there are echoes of Marcel Proust, Valle Inclán and the classic of enlightened thought. Despite this, he is a writer with his own voice, marked by the dictates of memory, delicate irony and philosophical thought.
His most well-known novel is Bearn o la sala de les nines (Bearn, or the dolls’ room), translated into more than twenty languages and that has made the journey across to theatre, television and film. The work is based in 19th-century Majorca and reflects the values of a society undergoing total transformation: for Villalonga “the only paradises are lost”.
His first novel, Mort de dama (1931) takes place in the Palma’s old town, in the “streets in the shadow of the cathedral”. In an old ancestral home, amongst visitors and family members, we experience the worries and anguish of Obdúlia de Montcada, a member of Majorca’s nobility who represents the values of a dying aristocratic society. Villalonga describes the contrast between this conservative environment and the arrival of tourism to the city, which changes everything.
Llorenç Villalonga lived on carrer Estudi General Lul·lià, in one of the imposing mansions that characterise Palma’s old town. They are buildings connected to the island’s nobility. Their architecture is unique, above all owing to their austere façades and how they are built around an interior courtyard, where the most beautiful elements are concentrated: columns, capitals, coats of arms, and so on.
