Nil Forcada's Teoria del ridícul Unveils Andorra's Cursed Writer Mael Palau

Nil Forcada returns with *Teoria del ridícul*, a metaliterary quest published by Marinada that won the literary essay prize at the Night of Literature two years ago but has only now appeared in print.

Known to Andorran readers for *Tolls*, his genre-fiction debut co-authored with Sara Reis under her pseudonym La Gata—which also earned a Fiter i Rossell award—Forcada now reveals a bolder style. The new work echoes the puzzle-like experiments of Roberto Bolaño and Enrique Vila-Matas, as well as David Gálvez's debut *Cartes mortes*. It assembles a patchwork of fabricated documents—letters, articles, diary entries, interviews, and excerpts from stories and novels—into a biographical hunt for Mael Palau, presented as Andorra's first and only cursed writer.

Palau emerges as a vocations eccentric and total failure, impossible to pin down as misunderstood genius or compulsive hack. Forcada contrasts him with Antoni Morell (1941-2020), the official father of Andorran literature and author of the monumental *Set lletanies de mort*, which doubles as an anthropological treatise. Morell, Forcada argues, left no true heirs among active writers, neither literary nor spiritual. Yet late in life, he flirted with outsider status.

Palau obsesses over Morell as his rival: the elder as statesman and concise chronicler of Andorra's mists, the younger as a rootless wanderer whose science-fiction tales bristle with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and feverish links. Driven to outdo him, Palau rewrites Morell's novels in a method tested on *La metamorfosi*, stripped of Gregor Samsa's beetle transformation and styled after Pierre Menard's *Quixote*. *Set lletanies de mort* becomes *Fata Morgana*; *Borís I, rei d'Andorra* turns into *Esta lluvia*. His magnum opus, the thousand-page dystopia *Grandalla*, envisions a fully urbanized Andorra from Runer to Baladrà. It remains unpublished, though Forcada cites friends' accounts and supposed manuscripts at the National Archive (ACA 7710 and 7711)—which readers are advised against seeking.

Palau's life unravels in exile after leaving Andorra in the mid-1960s amid a hazy homosexual incident with a friend. He drifts through Chile, Mexico, Zaragoza, and Vigo, with a brief Andorran return, before dying obscurely in 1993, hit by a truck in Granada—unpublished and all but forgotten. In a twist, Forcada positions him as Morell's unwitting literary heir.

The author calls the book a "literary coca de recapte," stitched from handy texts into a coherent artifact. It features nods to figures like Leonardo Piglia and Jean-Luc Godard alongside locals such as Quim Torredà and Manel Gibert. Txema Díaz-Torrent's foreword warns against wasting time on it, but Forcada embeds gems, including Palau's take on writing: an act of arrogance, imposture, and inquiry into the void, defined by the notion of the ridiculous.