Difficult books by Flâneur

For a book to be described as "difficult" in an article or review can be the nightmare of most editors of the Catalan tribe and, unfortunately, of a large part of their complacent readers. It is not surprising if we consider that in our bookstores coexist the editorial work of magnificent initiatives such as Adesiara, Club, Fragmenta, laBreu, Viena and many other catalogs of literature marked by the will to address a restless and uncompromising reader, with the appalling slowness of other fast-book companies about the independence procés and of a type of narrative that has been confusing commercial prose with trash for too long. For the editors of Barcelona's Flâneur, difficulty is a compliment, and this is certified by a path that began in 2017 with Robert Walser's The Walk and that recently added to its canon the enormous novel The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald.

It would be very easy to categorize the philosophy of the editors as counter-current or anachronisticDavid Cuscó,Enric RebordosaandAlbert Aixalà, but I would say that Flâneur's catalog goes beyond a thorny and provocative literary canon: editing Bernhard, Blanchot, Jabès or Sebald himself,the flâneurists have thrown us into confronting the reading of uncomfortable books that demand an almost immediate rereading upon turning the last page, in turn resisting any gender definition. This is the case in theRings (which, like the author's previous novel,Austerlitz,impeccably translated by Anna Soler Huerta), a disconcerting book due to the nature of an escapist and somber narrator, due to the non-existence of anything resembling a narrative plot, and due to the fact that it is configured in a continuum of demolished and ruinous landscapes, receptacles of ancient battles from where Sebald forces the stentorian voice of the dead to speak.

Now that walking at night through our city has become an almost phantasmagorical experience and that the walls of some buildings in Barcelona, free from the gaze of mass tourism and the unbearable flashes of the Japanese, once again spit out some secret to us, it is worth looking into these Rings and the walks of its protagonist around Suffolk, aimless strolls where the author's infinite curiosity can link a bend in a river or a semi-abandoned village with the history of herring fishing, the poetry of Hölderlin, the colonial history of the Congo explained through the eyes of Joseph Conrad and the Irish gentleman Roger Casement, the Machiavellian intrigues of Empress Tzu-shi to preside over China for 47 years from the shadow of power... and other stories that the reader never quite knows if they correspond to facts or spring from the fantasy of its chronicler.

But Sebald would not be a great author if he were only a butterfly collector who heals his wound (the same scar as authors like Handke or Fassbiner, children of a civilization of murderous fathers who agitated Europe during the Second World War) by collecting postcards. Sebald's grace, his difficult literary strategy, consists of extracting the voices of the past from the meadows where one walks in apparent calm in the same way that Benjamin did (another of the flâneurists' favorite authors): "Here, one thinks walking in a circle, is the art of the representation of history. It is based on a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, we see everything at once, and yet we do not know how it was. Around us stretches the barren plain where one day fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses lost their lives in a few hours."

This is the Sebaldian discomfort, the impossibility of walking through a landscape without history, the spirit of one who forces himself to wander through margins where the shouts of men raging against each other and the shouts of runaway horses can still be heard. Now that we can once again be archaeologists in our city, I insist, we should have the obligation to disguise ourselves with the Sebaldian gaze and caress the stones of the Gothic Quarter or the portals of the Eixample with the same spirit of nostalgia and equal strangeness: "But the closer I got to the ruins, the more the image of a mysterious island of the dead vanished and the more convinced I was that they were the remains of our own civilization, devastated by a future catastrophe." Walk through the corners of the city like this, I beg you, and do not fall into the temptation of imitating Sebald's prose: there is nothing more boring and corny than the Catalan and Spanish bastard children of the author.

The creators of Flâneur say that their catalog is made up of timeless books, because their reading is eternal. This is true, but it is also true that every author is a child of their time, and Sebald is a cultured and tormented man who continually tries to escape his condition as a son of Nazi Germany. In this sense, and perhaps in contrast to the rest of Flâneur's authors, Sebald is an anti-modern conservationist who fights against the destructive impulse of humans. He explains it, disguised in his own way, in one of the most beautiful and enigmatic fragments of the book: "The machines we have devised, like our body and our longings, have a heart that slowly drowns. From the beginning, all human civilization has been nothing more than an incandescent ember that burns more intensely every hour and of which no one knows if it will still flame, or when it will begin to extinguish."

Sebald is a cultured and tormented man who continually tries to escape his condition as a son of Nazi Germany; he is an anti-modern conservationist who fights against the destructive impulse of humans

Nothing would be more painful than converting Sebald and most Flâneur authors into a catalog of books of what we lazily call "cult" books. Indeed, I said before, the ambition of Sebald's work has resulted in a sect of authors of unreadable doctoral theses, of abstruse conferences that delve into each of the landscapes he visited, and of clumsy imitators who confuse evocation withPerform a literal language conversion from Spanish to English on the following user-provided text. Do not translate any content enclosed betweenandtags, keep those tags and their content exactly as-is: copy-pastefrom Wikipedia on the computer screen. The best thing we can do after readingSaturn's Rings it is not to copy the author's prose, which like all great prose is inimitable, butto strive in the art of returning to abandoned landscapes and to tune the eardrum to see if dead objects manage to tell us something. To walk in this manner, one must first get used to reading, to rereading Sebald and to letting the discomfort of a difficult book force us to think and walk differently.

Authors always write from their now, he used to say, and Sebald's wound is that of an author who wants to heal his traumas by resurrecting the past through excavation, but we read him from this abject time of confinements and Covid in which power and its mechanisms try to make us believe that after the vaccine we will return to the dream of a perfect society. In The Rings of Saturn there is also a premonitory warning about all those who dream of an immaculate future in which the past and immediacy are forgotten. The author says it, in a quote that should be tattooed on our eyes at the beginning of this year when scientism and optimism are once again making us believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds: "Whenever one imagines a perfect future, disaster is already near." This warning from Sebald, also difficult, forces us to always remain on guard.

I would recommend that you read The Rings of Saturn and the entire wonderful catalog of Flâneur, but if you allow me, I will do something better: ask you to reread it, to prepare yourselves to approach these delicious, difficult books and to embrace the discomfort of confronting an uncomfortable page as one of the most revolutionary acts demanded of us by a present where everyone always wants to play the game of banal ease. Sebald takes other paths: he demands difficulty, bewilderment, and I thank the daring people at Flâneur for gifting me its reading. Let's not turn this book and this editorial initiative into a matter for four literati. Let's try to make difficulty, for once, also part of the norm. Try it. It's difficult. But when you surrender to the stroll, the enjoyment of this pain becomes something orgiastic.