There were more shocking news for me when I got back home yesterday.

Via Toni Hermoso, I learned that Toni Cucarella, a Valencian writer I recently discovered, just announced that he has abandoned his writing activities, just a little bit after announcing he wouldn't further update his blog.

I learned about Toni Cucarella's literature aproximately one year ago, when I heard about a new novel, Quina lenta agonia, la dels ametlers perduts, on the radio, which sounded interesting. The book fascinated me as soon as I started reading. Describing the life of a group of children in the outskirts of Xàtiva, a small city south of València, in the late 1960s, Cucarella managed to transmit some feelings about my childhood during the summers of the early 80s around my town in the inner province of Castelló.

It wasn't anything in particular what did this, but the way the book was written, which managed to describe how these kids lived happily and in freedom around their houses, regardless their economic status and the difficulties their families went through. All of this reminded me of my sister, cousins and friends running around the streets and fields, away from our parents or any adults, in a time when nobody thought this was dangerous or irresponsible. The only two sins were to play on the road or to get back home a lot after the sunset.

Toni Cucarella has been very vocal against the Language Authorities in València regarding the unity of the Catalan language, and specifically against the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, a recently created institution which now has competence over the "Valencian language", something that was previously in the hands of a scientific institution like the Universitat de València. He has finally burned out, not only due to the bad situation Catalan literature is in the Valencian Country, but also because leaving aside two very prominent exceptions, Valencian authors are basically ignored in Catalunya, making their subsistence quite difficult.

I hope Toni can build some new motivations after some time and the public can enjoy new novels written by him in the future, as well as more of those very interesting blog entries we had got used to reading every few days.

In the meanwhile, thanks for your writings, Toni, and good luck with your new activities!

Last night, when we got home after the long weekend up around the awesome Terres de l'Ebre, first thing I learned from the news is that Augusto Pinochet had finally died while we were driving back. It is too bad that once again he managed to avoid a trial that would have made him officially guilty of all the horrible happenings of Chile during his military coup and his bloody dictatorship.

But he's gone now, and this will be a great relief for the thousands of Chileans who survived his regime, and for those who lost family members or friends just because they defended some ideals. The world will associate his surname to torture, murder and corruption; he surely won't be remembered for the image of the old, calm man surrounded by family members that an ever-shrinking minority tried to transmit.

Last night, I raised my cup to celebrate Pinochet's death. ¡Viva Chile!