Dark Vales

The protagonist, Father Llatzer, a priest banished for doctrinal heresy to an isolated, backward mountain parish, struggles to achieve personal redemption by bringing salvation to his primitive, taciturn, rural flock. Their mute atavism is disturbed only by the local whore, Footloose, embodying all the forces against which the priest's reforming mission is directed. Ambiguity surrounds the denouement of that conflict.

Dark Vales is as as compelling today as when it was first written.

Raimon Casellas i Dou (b. Barcelona 1855) died, almost certainly by suicide, in 1910. The motives for his premature death can be read between the lines of his 1901 novel Dark Vales (Els sots ferestecs). He published two collections of short stories (Les multituds: 1906; Llibre d'hista²ries: 1909). Casellas was an art historian, critic and a leading figure in Catalan Modernisme, which aspired to set Catalan culture on the same cosmopolitan footing as the advanced national cultures of contemporary Europe.

Alan Yates, born in Northampton in 1944, is Emeritus Professor of Catalan at Sheffield University where he worked for 30 years, after graduation (1966) and then a Ph.D. (1971) from Cambridge. His teaching and research straddled the fields of the language and the modern literature of the Catalan-speaking lands. He has published several books and numerous articles in these fields, now keeping a foot in both by devoting himself to literary translation. The rest of his time is devoted to mountaineering and nostalgic fell-running.

Eva Bosch is a Catalan painter, writer and video maker. She writes on prehistoric art, and has lectured on Picasso and Miro at the National Gallery, Tate Modern and the Instituto Cervantes. Born in Barcelona, she grew up in Montmany-Figuero, the village where Dark Vales takes place. In 1973, she fled the upheavals of Franco's regime to settle in the UK. She now lives and works in London with regular sojourns in her atelier in her home village, combining her studio work with lecturing in the History of Art. www.evabosch.co.uk