Contes urbans

With the arrival of the new century, Mercè Ibarz published A la ciutat en obras and Febre de carrer, two collections of short stories, now recovered, in which she left behind Saidí's native landscape and the agricultural lands in transformation to enter the bowels of the city and its chaotic clashes. As a counterpoint but also as a reformulation of that evocation of a world in crisis, Ibarz addresses in these Urban Tales the instability and fragility that cause the loss of friends, illness or death and changes in the world of work in the middle. of a city in permanent metamorphosis. Subject to the laws of memory, the protagonists of the eleven stories that make up this volume go through moments of vital transformation in a city that is also trying to overcome its own fractures and gaps. The itineraries they embark on are both a refuge and an escape route, an opportunity to annihilate a sense of existential strangeness. Everyone, in their own way, seeks the opportunity to overcome the nostalgia of the past and face the present with a purifying, almost cathartic spirit.