The space from which writers construct their books ends up filtered with more questions than answers: journalism and chronicles travel in broad daylight, exhibiting all details with a sometimes blinding impudence; narrative, on the other hand, hides truths — which perhaps are still lies — under contours softened by a thick fog. It is a gothic and intriguing image, surely debatable. The city, understood as a spectacle or as daily suffering, is the setting for a significant percentage of fictions. Since the birth of the modern novel, Barcelona has attracted hundreds of authors and appears in a remarkable number of texts that have become iconic, from Don Quixote to Vida privada, Mariona Rebull, La plaça del Diamant, Últimas tardes con Teresa and La magnitud de la tragèdia. Its literary presence becomes something more immeasurable year after year.
The novels of Enrique Vila-Matas mostly take place in urban spaces. "I write fiction from a space usually occupied mostly by essayists, from a place where I am seen plotting, thinking or writing behind the avatar of a narrator —he says—. This narrator is always in Barcelona, which is where I have written 95% of all my literary production. What happens in my books can happen anywhere, because it happens inside my mind and, therefore, it can even happen in Barcelona." In his latest novel, Kassel no invita a la lógica (2014), his character takes his stay at the German contemporary art festival as an escape from his city. "It is true that I have always wanted to escape from Barcelona —he admits—. I feel less alone and more comfortable and understood in Paris, New York, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, to mention just four places where this is evident. But I stay, because the best way to escape is to stay. The same thing happens to me as to flies. Where are they safest? Next to the fly swatter."
Vila-Matas, who recently won the Guadalajara International Book Fair award, has unquestionable international prestige and could even win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He can easily be found at the +Bernat bookstore on Buenos Aires street, almost always accompanied by his wife, Paula de Parma, to whom he dedicates all his books. It is one of the settings for the novel Aire de Dylan (2012). When he is not there—or traveling—he writes from home. "I work in the same apartment building where José Mallorquí wrote the El Coyote series, popular novels that became bestsellers during the post-war period," he recalls.
NOVELS AND CITIES
For quite some time, one of the recurring debates regarding the Catalan capital was to know which novel had portrayed it with more precision, although often, political connotations or even commercial excuses were mixed in the conclusions. Sergi Pàmies ironized on the subject in La gran novel·la sobre Barcelona (1999), a book composed of fifteen short stories totaling 144 pages. "It seems to me that it is a debate that does not exist and that did not exist then either —he states—. Only occasionally did someone appear who lamented the absence of a great novel about Barcelona. Regarding the reasons why there is no debate, the theories are multiple, but I believe it does not exist because, both in Spanish and Catalan, there are a lot of novels and novelists who explained the city literarily in a dignified enough way not to insist further on this bore."
Pàmies was born in Paris in 1960 and lived in Gennevilliers —in the metropolitan area of Paris— until he was eleven years old. He published his first book of short stories in 1986, T'hauria de caure la cara de vergonya, where unlocatable urban spaces predominated, as was the case in his three novels, published between 1990 and 1995, edited by Jaume Vallcorba Plana. "It seemed to me that without a name, without a biography, and without a specific place, the stories allowed all of that to transmit a feeling of helpless exposure—he acknowledges—. Later, I began to realize that the effort to hide identifying details went against the story and I stopped doing it depending on whether it was necessary or not." This new narrative strategy can be seen in books like La bicicleta estàtica (2010) and Cançons d'amor i de pluja (2013), published the same year as Tot allò que una tarda morí amb les bicicletes, by Llucia Ramis. "The protagonist has to return to her parents' house because she has lost her job and has no money —recalls the writer and journalist, about the narrator's forced change of scenery: she must leave Barcelona and temporarily settle in Palma de Mallorca—. The bubble she was cautiously walking on has burst, and now she is in free fall. Furthermore, she realizes that, because of that same caution, she has built nothing, everything has been provisional for too long and she has never had a future project." Llucia Ramis, in addition to writing from her room, has done so from "the terraces of the bars in Gràcia and La Sagrera" and some time ago, when she had worked as a flight attendant for a season, she had also filled notebooks in the bar behind TV3.
THE GREAT 'MADAME' OF THE BUBBLE
Llucia Ramis arrived in Barcelona in the late nineties and the city has become another character in her narrative. This is how she remembers the atmosphere she encountered: "She was a great madame who prostituted us all. She had undergone so many operations to make herself beautiful that she was starting to look like everyone else, with so much Botox in her face and silicone in her breasts. She was vulgar; she sported the same shops and aesthetics found in the center of all Western cities. She was always in the operating room, with her entrails exposed, and the cranes and drills represented a promise that never quite came true. There were construction sites everywhere. She sold herself to anyone, be it a builder or tourism, and we, her inhabitants, could do nothing but bow our heads and sell ourselves with her. She became more expensive for Barcelonans, and yet, she offered herself cheaply to others."
A darker and more criminal atmosphere than Llucia Ramis's is found in Calle de los olvidados (Street of the Forgotten), by Stefanie Kremser, which was published in German in 2011 and translated into Catalan and Spanish a year later. "In it, I talk about Barceloneta, I walk through speculation, through real estate mobbing, through the tourist boom and the massive construction of hotels in Ciutat Vella... It's a Barcelona with an old town on the verge of becoming a picturesque but empty setting, without neighborhood life, without space for its inhabitants," she says. The killer who acts in this context is a disturbed individual who wants to stop gentrification. Kremser was born in Germany in 1967, but grew up in São Paulo. She settled in Barcelona a little over a decade ago, during which time crime novels set in the city have been published, such as Marc Pastor's La mala dona (2008), or Carlos Zanón's Yo fui Johnny Thunders (2014). She has written books like Der Tag, an dem ich fliegen lernte —currently being translated into Catalan— and scripts for the television series Tatort: the episodes are ninety minutes long and tell self-contained stories, always structured around a crime. "As a port city, Barcelona has the special characteristic of being a point of arrival —says Kremser—. When I walk through El Raval, I imagine it's similar to a New York of a hundred years ago, to São Paulo in the 1960s. These are cities that have a centuries-old tradition as melting pots. Despite being relatively small, it has the gift of being tolerant, it knows how to live with the many languages spoken, with the diverse foreign heritages and their respective beliefs. Even with such extreme social contrasts. Barcelona does not demand complete assimilation or absolute homogeneity, because it has wisely learned that this does not exist." In addition to denouncing the real estate bubble in Calle de los olvidados, Kremser misses "the recognition for intellectual and artistic professions." She adds: "If respect and support for cultural creation had not been left behind, it could be a great city for writers and artists of all kinds. We have many sources of inspiration here, but we cannot live solely on beautiful air."
TWO WRITERS IN THE LIBRARY
The job insecurity in the world of culture emerges in Albert Serra (the novel, not the filmmaker), the first novel by Albert Forns, published in 2012. "I portray the Barcelona of today, specifically my day-to-day, but always trying to recover the strange vision, the surprise, the distanced point of view of someone seeing it for the first time, with the aim of avoiding a gray and mechanical description," he says. Forns is from Granollers, but has lived in the Gràcia neighborhood for years. Albert Forns has built Albert Serra and his next book from libraries, both public and private. "I am a firm believer in documentation and reading while I write, so that one idea leads me to another. In this sense, libraries are an inexhaustible source of books —he maintains—. They are also a quiet space, especially in the mornings when there are no children, comfortable (there is heating) and without the hustle and bustle, the crowd, or what I would have to pay if I worked in a bar." Forns also praises libraries that require accreditation, such as the Ateneu —frequented in another time by Josep Pla and where Sagarra wrote Vida privada for two summer months—, the MACBA, or the Fundació Tàpies: "You can leave your laptop on the table, ask the person opposite to watch it, and go down to eat or have a coffee without problems. You have all the comforts of an office without having to pay for a coworking." In addition to the tranquility, security, and economic benefits of working from a library, Forns also highlights that from there he is not distracted nor does he have obligations like washing dishes or doing laundry: "At home, everything would be an excuse to stop writing."
Ignacio Vidal-Folch, author of an extensive, robust, and surprising narrative work, also usually works in libraries. "I like the Biblioteca de Catalunya for its Gothic naves, so airy and relativizing of today, and, of course, because I can consult books I don't have at home —he clarifies—. The MNAC's is very clear and has natural light. Since it's a bit set apart from the museum, it's usually empty, which is very pleasant. It's a shame that in both, as in other libraries throughout Spain, the hours are not up to par. They are closed on Saturday afternoons. And also on Sundays."
In the same Biblioteca de Catalunya that Eugeni d'Ors helped promote during the second decade of the 20th century, while he was general secretary of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Vidal-Folch has worked on novels such as Contramundo (2006) or Pronto seremos felices (2014) and on the essays of Barcelona, museo secreto (2009): "The repeated passage through the same places can end up turning an objectively beautiful city into a routine and almost invisible setting; in Barcelona, museo secreto I set out to enhance, with the help of my cultural memory and that of some friends who told me their ideas, a fluid relationship between urban places and those of painting, literature and cinema that would infuse new life and a new mystery into the old setting."
Vidal-Folch began publishing comics in Barcelona in the early eighties, the same city where detective Pepe Carvalho, created by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán years earlier, roamed, where La ciudad de los prodigios, which Eduardo Mendoza would publish in 1986, was incubated, the one that inspired Juan Marsé of El amante bilingüe (1990) and the one that was the setting for numerous stories and articles by Quim Monzó. What has changed between that city and the current one? "The biggest difference is that in that first Barcelona I was young, and in the current one I am no longer —he replies—. The change in the point from which a phenomenon is observed changes the phenomenon. Perhaps it is only for this reason that now the city before the 'damned Olympic Games' seems more shabby and decayed and collapsed to me, but also more vital and hopeful, with more open perspectives. In general, the whole world gets uglier decade after decade. And so do I."
A PLACE TO STAY OR TO FLEE FROM IT?
Imma Monsó lived in Barcelona between the ages of 17 and 32: "As a child, I dreamed of living there, but after three years here, I already wanted to leave," she recalls. "I discovered that what I like most is having it very close, to be able to arrive and leave." Before debuting with No se sap mai (1996), Monsó had already been living in Sant Cugat for some time. "From home, I see Tibidabo and I like to think that the city is there behind it, expectant and full of life but at a prudent distance. What I like most is arriving via the Arrabassada road and seeing its formidable panorama, but any other entrance also seems fine to me. The same goes for exits: Barcelona, for me, has never been the security of home, but adventure." The city makes "very tangential" appearances in the novels of the author, who won the Ramon Llull Prize 2012 and the National Literature Prize for La dona veloç: "The space of the countryside and the forest is primordial in my fiction," she acknowledges.
Bel Olid debuted in 2011 with Una terra solitària, but it was a year later that La mala reputació solidified her as an author with a disturbing and uncomfortable literary voice. Some of the best stories in the book are set in Barcelona, adding to the heterogeneous tradition of narrators who precede her, from Pere Calders, Mercè Rodoreda, and Jordi Sarsanedas to Pedro Zarraluki, Francesc Serés, Maria Barbal, and Marta Rojals. "In general, I am interested in the city as a place where the improbable is possible, as a space that admits deviations from the norm more easily than a village, where social control is greater," she states. "Also as a place of shared solitude, of course." Olid finds it difficult to write at home and has her "mental map of quiet bars with Wi-Fi" where she often goes to work: "It's like being at an airport or in a hotel, all the time you have until the next plane belongs to you, no one bothers you, you can write without remorse for not doing something useful."
The isolation of the bar does not stimulate the creativity of Lluís-Anton Baulenas. When he researches for one of his novels —where he admits that "the appearance of Barcelona is constant"— he goes out with a camera. "Later, at home —he adds— he retrieves the information he was looking for thanks to the image." In La felicitat (2001), he recreated the transformation of the city at the beginning of the 20th century, and in Quan arribi el pirata i se m'emporti (2013) he focused on El Raval during the years of the last crisis, in the same streets where the action of the "indignadas" and highly recommended El desertor en el camp de batalla, by Julià de Jòdar, and Carrer Robadors, by Mathias Énard, published the same year as Baulenas's novel, take place. "Both in the novels that are happening now and in those set in the past— he comments— I present an image of an ancient city, with many layers of accumulated experiences, capable of everything, of the best and the worst." Two spaces that appear from time to time in his novels are service areas and gas stations: "The anecdotes related to these spaces are the result of observation—he states—. I have written about a gas station store employee reading a philosophy book or about a highway gas station chosen as a place for a separated couple to exchange a child because it is the midpoint between the two homes."
The carriers of Maletes perdudes, by Jordi Puntí, could have refueled at one of the Barcelona gas stations in Baulenas' novels. Since its publication in 2010, the novel has been translated into 15 languages: its success abroad has few precedents in Catalan literature, and began a year before Jaume Cabré's Jo confesso, where Barcelona is also one of the prominent settings of the action. "Both in the short story collections Pell d'armadillo (1998) and Animals tristos (2002), the city is a veiled presence, which I often describe in detail because it helps define the characters, but which, however, appears without a name because I am interested in it being confused with other cities, especially European ones: places where design has triumphed, where all the stores look alike and couples fight in the Ikea on the outskirts. In Maletes perdudes, on the other hand, Barcelona is important and is the space where I set a love story. The city helps to cross the destinies of the characters, who get lost and find each other perhaps dozens of times; in this process, the reader can visit an era and understand the changes that were taking place [one must go back to the 1970s], with the arrival of working-class immigration and the growth of the peripheral neighborhoods, for example, or with the transformation of the old Camp de la Bota."
Puntí has lived a good part of the last year in New York, where he was researching the life of the musician and orchestra conductor Xavier Cugat, protagonist of his next novel. Although he spent much of his life in the United States, in the 1970s—while Rodoreda was writing Mirall trencat—, Cugat lived in Catalonia and stayed for a long time in one of the suites of the Ritz. "I imagine Cugat when he lived there, with a nonchalance cultivated throughout his life, who knows if longing for the days when he reigned at the Waldorf Astoria in New York," comments the author in one of the historic rooms of the current Palace on Gran Via. In Puntí's next novel, Barcelona will play a rather secondary role, but the city will once again shine like a luxury hotel chandelier.