{"id":3001,"date":"2026-10-01T08:57:40","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T08:57:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canlluis.com\/terenci-moix-and-can-lluis-a-writers-raval\/"},"modified":"2026-10-18T15:16:29","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T15:16:29","slug":"terenci-moix-and-can-lluis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canlluis.com\/en\/terenci-moix-and-can-lluis\/","title":{"rendered":"Terenci Moix and Can Llu\u00eds: a writer’s Raval"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Some writers visit a neighbourhood. Others are born there, carry it with them all their lives and give it back as literature. Terenci Moix was one of the latter. Before he became one of the most widely read authors in the country, before the prizes and the television, he was a boy from El Raval who played a few minutes’ walk from Carrer de la Cera.<\/p>\n\n

A cinematic birth<\/h2>\n\n

Ramon Moix i Messeguer was born on 5 January 1942 on Carrer de Ponent, today’s Carrer de Joaqu\u00edn Costa, where a plaque has marked his birthplace since 2004. He liked to tell in his memoirs that his mother went into labour while watching Luz de gas<\/em> (Gaslight<\/em>) at the cinema. Small wonder that cinema became one of the great passions of his life.<\/p>\n\n

He was the son of a painter and a seamstress who copied Hollywood designs from magazines, and the brother of the poet and novelist Ana Mar\u00eda Moix. His Raval was the Raval of the post-war years: narrow streets, neighbours who knew everything about everyone, and local cinemas where he took refuge every Saturday.<\/p>\n\n

The neighbourhood as mythology<\/h2>\n\n

That Raval never left his work. He portrayed it in El dia que va morir Marilyn<\/em> (1969), one of the key novels of post-war Catalan literature, and returned to it years later in his memoirs, El peso de la paja<\/em>, which open with El cine de los s\u00e1bados<\/em>. In these pages the neighbourhood is at once setting, family and myth.<\/p>\n\n

His career was extraordinary:<\/p>\n\n