“I am reluctant to say that The Muses It is the posthumous novel by Jordi Cussà”, assured the editor Jordi Puig, from Comanegra, at the presentation of the book, on Tuesday at the Fàbrica Lehman. And he explained, in this sense, that luckily “they had time to talk and work on it. It is not a rescued novel. Yes, it is a work that closes the trilogy on civilization that began twenty years earlier, with The snake (Column, 2001), and continued with The Cyclops, 2017). And it is, at the same time, a book that condenses his work and, yes, culminates it.
Raül Garrigasait also thinks so, for whom it is “a very complete way of closing the work, since it brings together the world of more or less historical novels with junkies, and at the same time it is a certain history of creation”. And he develops it: “With a thread that connects Ramon Llull with William Shakespeare, Clara Schumann or Camille Claudel, always presented as heterodox characters,” and also Patti Smith, Cervantes, Mozart, Galilei, Poe, Einstein, The Beatles… “We found Jordi Cussà 100%”, he exclaims. For Garrigasait, moreover, he shows “his wood as an incontinent story-teller, linking one story after another and it could never end”, with a taste for colloquial language and the creation of language that is a joy in literature.
With ‘Les muses’, Jordi Cussà culminates all of his work, in addition to a trilogy started twenty years ago
Laura G. Ortensi remembered the first time she went to see him and how naturally she received him. For her, The Muses “It has the aftertaste of a literary testament, in which the author could finally claim very clearly that they remove the junkie label, because he was very clear that he did not want to be a junkie who writes, but a writer who was once a junkie.” For her, although novels like Wild horses (Columna, 2000, reissued by L’Albí in 2016 and now turned into a comic with KAP in Pagès Editors) and Formentera Lady (LaBreu, 2015) would have given it a certain resonance, they were like the gong that, when it sounds, does not let the rest of the orchestra be heard. “Cussà was an uncomfortable person for the Catalan literary system, because of the themes and the way of writing and responding, because he had no need to look good”. And that, added to the fact that he did not participate in face-to-face sessions that are so important today in the cultural world, he said, that one day you have to be in one place and the next in another, and be on the networks, also contributed to making his work did not have the recognition it deserved, which it received, yes, in recent years and especially when it published The first emperor and queen Luna (Comanegra, 2020), which also received the Serra d’Or Critics Award.
Ortensi also read a fragment of the book to show, in addition to its intensity (“he tensed the language as a poet does,” he said), the relationship between the erotic drive and that of writing.
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Neighbor of Berga, Francesc Ribera, Titothe did not remember when they met, but he did remember some anecdotes (“Your brother has opened a bar, right?”, Titot told him; “Yes, he opens them and I close them”, answered Cussà) and how, in addition to doing theater together (Cussà co-founded the company Anònim Teatre, for which he wrote and directed) they translated the work of Guillem de Berguedà together and even had the gesture, without saying anything, of waiting for the Brams singer to publish his novel The murder of Guillem de Berguedà (Amsterdam, 2015), before editing he The troubadour Cuadeferro (L’Albí, 2016) about the character. A gesture to which he gave importance because “life is portrayed not only by the work, but also and above all by what we do”.