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Cròniques de la veritat oculta
Hidden Truth Chronicles is a key work in Calders' writing and represents the discovery, for postwar readers, of an extraordinary storyteller. The author's humour and fantasy had, with the years, gained in intensity, depth and ambiguity, an ambiguity which always permeates fantastic literature, from Poe to Kafka, passing through Pirandello or Bontempelli.
The first time our panellists met to discuss the books participating in NSB13, they were very curious about Cròniques de la Veritat Oculta”. They were attracted by the author´s biography and also some of the critiques they had read about his work. The six Panellists were very keen to know more about this book. In their second meeting and after reading Peter Bush´s positive report, they all agreed to include it in the short list.
Pere Calders is one of the most important Catalan writers from the last century. This collection of stories is his third and was published in 1955. Catalan critics consider it to be one of his best and compare him and it with Kafka, Pirandello and Borges. (...)
The main feature in Calders' stories is the way surreal or magical happenings suddenly erupt into everyday life and this has led critics to speak of 'magical realism' in his work. His stories are based on the appearance of some unforeseen or unusual event that forces characters to act accordingly and thus confront such situations using their logic when what they face is in fact absurd. This presence of the fantastic means that his stories are set in a time and place that seems abstract, imprecise or unrecognisable, but even so they give a critical portrait of his time and society. (...)
Pere Calders' stories are thought to be masterpieces in the genre of fantasy fiction but it would be wrong to see them merely as that, since behind each story lurks a writer who scrutinises reality and uses fantasy elements to expose the contradictions within human behaviour. In this sense, his stories aim to provoke his readers and make them think critically. He doesn't deliver moral homilies. (From the reader report by Peter Bush)