Siege in the Room

Carrer Marsala, which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya—neither of which Bauçà bothered to accept—is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In The Old Man, the narrator observes a strange building where a decrepit prisoner is ritually beaten by a policeman once a week. The Warden details the narrator''s own captivity, and his relationship with the woman who keeps him prisoner. In Martha Tennent''s haunting translation, reminiscent of a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Miquel Bauçà''s work is a pungent reminder of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.