"I am happy with my career. I live without haste, with enough maturity to enjoy the projects I get involved in without needing validation, without needing applause. I believe you can be happy without needing to conquer the world and, simply, by making sure the world doesn't conquer you." The writer and journalist Francesc Soler sips his evening glass of white wine, a ritual he tries to observe every afternoon, "although it's curious how hard it is to find bars in Barcelona that serve good local wines or cavas, despite us being a global wine power."
The first notes of La femme d'argent, which open Air's Moon safari, play, and "it seems incredible that more than 25 years have passed since this album was released." The bar's atmosphere livens up. The regular smiles, comfortable and with a lively, awake gaze, despite having been up since 3:45 AM. Every day he gets up at that hour, a reminiscence of a large part of his life at the helm of morning radio news. "And I got into journalism guided by a love for writing, for narrating stories in black and white," he recalls about a sweet time, where masters like Joan Barril or Joan Manuel Tresserras taught him more than just the simple tools for work. "Besides teaching, those professors inspired."
Born in Roda de Ter, while other kids played soccer and dreamed of being Schuster, young Francesc's particular Olympus was composed of the holy trinity of local literati: "Miquel Martí i Pol, Emili Teixidor, and Miquel Obiols, who passed away very recently and who, besides being a great television creator, was also a great writer." From them and from the town's public school, the regular has inherited that taste for the muscular, colorful Catalan of the area. "Those expressions and words that must be kept alive because they explain a way of thinking, of living, that is very much from there, and that are not reflected in the simple, functional Catalan spoken in the city."
Coming to live in Barcelona was, on the other hand, and in part, liberating. "It was when I came out, and I must say it was a festive process. I never led a double life or anything like that, but when I told my family, I was already a young adult. For me, in fact, homosexuality has a lot to do with self-sufficiency. That empowering oneself depends only on oneself. And also with empathy, because, although I haven't suffered it, I am part of a collective that is still persecuted in many parts of the world."
Having lived enough
A moment came in Francesc's life when, after almost a decade and a half working at Catalunya Ràdio, the need for a change became imperative. And that change had a lot to do with the need to write. "In 2021 I felt that I had already lived enough things to have something interesting to write about, something more than interview books, which was what I had published until then."
Thus was born Barcelona, demà o aquesta tarda, a satire about the city "suffered by someone who lived many years in the Sagrada Familia neighborhood and saw how it was turning into hell." He sips some wine, smiles, continues: "I feel like Nostradamus, because many of the things I said in this book about gentrification, tourists, overcrowding, have been coming true!" His next work, El somriure del dofins, tackled a very different register. "It was the book I had carried inside for years. An imagined autofiction that forced me to take an adult look at the scenarios and moments of my childhood and adolescence."
With the recently published Sarah, mereixes saber-ho (Rosa dels Vents), the author changes tack again, this time to weave a thriller of complicities, friendship, and fraternity in the face of sexist violence capable of acquiring multiple faces, different ways of hurting, of damaging, of exposing the grotesque danger of the abuser. This writing career is complemented by collaborations in various media such as TVE, RAC1, TV3 or this same newspaper, with the monthly section Hashtag Barcelona.
Reinventing oneself too much
"My relationship with Barcelona has been changing, from the first years in which I lived it as my refuge, my home, to the present, in which I have with it a relationship of ambivalence in which I cannot help but wonder if, in exchange for everything it demands of me, this city gives me an equivalent return," reasons the author.
The regular does not hide his love for the Eixample, which for him reflects the modern, orderly and European essence of a city "that, nevertheless, gives me a feeling of wanting to reinvent itself too much and too many times, thus losing its essence, its tradition, and ending up giving the feeling that everything is ephemeral, provisional. That, here, things cannot last," he observes, finishing his glass of wine.
--- What always endures is the quality of the food at this Bar. In case you want to have something to eat after your drink.
Francesc Soler smiles.
"I'm very much into tapas, it goes very well with my tastaolletes character," he replies. "And it's something that also goes very well with my way of writing, changing genres and styles with each work," he adds, without taking his eyes off the tapas and portions menu.