The masks of the self

In this book, Josep M. Quintana does an exercise in memory, he reviews his work of literary creation –elaborately based on events that have marked the life of his native Menorca– and he does so in dialogue with people who have been close to him and influenced the subjects he deals with in his books. Thus, the author talks with professors Antoni Comas, Jordi Castellanos, Aland Yates and Dominic Keown; with the publisher Isidor Cónsul; with politicians Ernest Lluch and Miguel Herrero de Miñón; with the conductor Nello Santi; with journalists Francesc-Marc Álvaro and Lluís Foix; with the painter Florit Nin, the bishop Sebastià Taltavull, and the writer Gabriel Janer Manila. At the same time, he holds an impossible debate with the canon and historian Vila Anglada and the architect and thinker Nicolau M. Rubió i Tudurí at the University of Montpellier about the conquest of Menorca by King Alfonso the Liberal.

In Les màscares del jo, Josep M. Quintana strips down as a writer and offers us a critical and at the same time tender look at his life and literary experience.

The only thing that really counts in literature is that a man like me —the writer, in this case— can tell a story. And what you, the readers, have to evaluate is how he will have manipulated it. How will he have constructed with words this parallel reality that is literature.