The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat

The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat by Sergi Pàmies, translated from the Catalan by Adrian Nathan West, is a collection of a baker dozen stories on relationships between strangers, spouses, parents and children. Loosely interconnected, these stories are meditative vignettes, more like essays. The first story 'Eclipse' exerts a mysterious pull and offers a good start and the second story is an intelligent discourse on marriages that are crumbling from within. 

On early signs of divorce, the author writes - "It’s not true that the erosion is imperceptible. Long before the point of festering, it makes itself known through details couples notice but refuse to acknowledge, because inertia has hobbled their capacity for decision-making or because they try to believe better days are on the way". (from the story - Outline of a Lecture for a Hypothetical Conference of Divorcees).

It is only as I read the third story, I realised that the collection is more or less autobiographical, one can actually equate it to a deconstructed memoir. In 'Mother-Son Christmas Carol', the author writes about his nonagenarian 'writer' mother who puts up a tough fight against delusional dementia in a geriatric residence before losing it and shifting to the care of her elder son and daughter-in-law who tend to her well unto her death. The author (the younger son) ensures his mother writes and edits till her final day.  He writes - "My mother liked to repeat that the advantage of being a writer was that everything that happened to you could be turned into literature, sooner or later. It wasn’t an original thought, and she tended to repeat it to encourage me to write when I was going through hard times". 

Most stories here have an unnamed narrator but there's a strong sense of intimacy in the text indicating that mostly everything written here is from the author's personal experiences - his tumultuous adolescence, little insecurities as his parents age, his failed marriage and divorce, his bouts of anxiety and his raising kids/trying to be a good father.

Little history unfolds in the backdrop, especially in the longest story in the collection - I'm No One to be Giving you Advice where we learn of the Catalan independence, the Francisco Franco's regime, about Rudolf Hess and his death in the Spandau prison and the French resistance to German occupation. Also, the title of the collection  is derived from this story where the author obsesses over the right way of wearing a trench coat, something he says he would never perfect like many men he knew did - his father and the men his mother liked, including his parents' friend, (the renowned author and a Buchenwald concentration camp survivor) Jorge Semprùn, whom he even fancied as his father during his adolescent days. 

The writing is mostly beautiful dealing with everything from serious to trivial with a certain levity. But it is also far from lucid, if not ornate, with really long sentences tying up the reader in knots at many places. 

The author says nostalgia is archaeology: it looks for vestiges and interprets them but as we dig into this collection, we feel a little overworked with these vestiges as there is nothing pathbreaking.