The reception of Jesús Moncada’s work at the beginning of his literary career was determined by the debate between «rural novel» and «urban novel», up to the point of directing its reading towards an elegiac dimension, at the expense of other distinctive traits of greater importance. In this sense, Moncada’s work has been understood, in an almost exclusive way, as a literary recording of the collective memory. The present article suggests a different reading of «Estremida memòria», in order to discover the essenciality of the irony in the author’s world, in this case, through the characteristic procedures of metafiction: metalepsi and metatextuality. The recreation of Mequinenza’s history is in the background, according to the reflection on the process of writing and on the mechanisms of capturing and reproducing this reality by means of Literature