BY NATURE OF A PROLOGUE
(…) Carn d’olla's most vivid impact comes from its well-tuned ear and from the strength and credibility of the dialogues that Jame Cabré builds into the novel. The reader realises that the book has been built on an intersection of voices, one of which is that of the author himself who, in a kind of offstage role, draws in and introduces the others. The strategy is quite a narrative challenge, but one that has been skilfully resolved, producing the luxury of a novel that uses tongue-bitingly meaty and realistic dialogues. On this specific point, in what could be termed hard labour on the living body of language, Carn d'olla exemplifies the author's thoughts and reflections almost twenty years on, when he muses on the art of language, and writes: "phonemes, words, sentences, paragraphs, are all living, breathing material, which link up and take on a rhythm and cadence of their own, thus, miraculously, acquiring their own meaning".Carn d'olla is presented as the origin of maturity of a novelist who has had one of the most consistent careers in contemporary Catalan writing and who has also proved himself to be an excellent television scriptwriter. Cabré is a writer with a powerful ear for dialogue, clearly the most important talent for a good scriptwriter. His fluent style spreads itself liberally across the whole of Carn d'olla and, to return to my opening remarks, it has withstood the test of time. More than twenty years on from when it first saw the light of day, the novel's soul continues to function, like the tasty dish that brought it to life late in 1978.
Extract from 'By nature of a prologue' in Carn d’olla, ‘Biblioteca Jaume Cabré’, Ed. Proa B. 1999