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n Wednesday, May 9, Els ulls dels homes mentiders (The Eyes of Lying Men) by Jordi Coca, the fourth installment of the seven that make up 'Matar el monstre' (Killing the Monster) by Comanegra, arrives in bookstores. We said in a previous article that it will not be the essays that currently stock bookstore shelves that will define the Barcelona of the process, but fiction. This editorial project is even more ambitious. It aims to build a great polyphonic fresco of the city based on seven novels by seven authors of different generations and styles.
Each of them is independent of the rest, but at the same time is linked to the others by a tribute to Frankenstein as a backdrop and with a character who appears in all of them, but with a changed name. In 1818, two centuries ago this year, Mary Shelley's Modern Prometheus was published, which a century later cinema would popularize. The parallel story of this mysterious figure that links them all, the reader will be able to solve next Christmas, when the last three works — Secundaris by Núria Cadenas, Vindràs amb mi després del diluvi (You Will Come With Me After the Flood) by Mar Bosch and Angèlica i Rafel by Miguel de Palol, are released.
An author extracts from the past, but inevitably does so from their experience of the present. TheNBP has asked each of the first four authors participating in the project to take their personal exercise in fiction a little further and look for what similarities they have found between the times in which they set the plot of their respective novels and contemporary Barcelona.
In 1818, family circumstances forced a young woman, Carmen Coroleu, to take charge of a family calico factory. The city emerged from the War of Independence amidst a liberal boom, but at the same time constrained by its walls and its growing population. Ada Castells, author of La primavera pendent (The Pending Spring) which opens the heptalogy, believes that there is a current resonance in that era because «Barcelona cannot progress economically because of a Bourbon who remains impervious to change. Ferdinand VII has been The Desired One, but when it comes down to it, he ignores the Cadiz Constitution which offered some hope of change in a country plagued by stagnation and the exploitation of oligarchs.»
Susanna Rafart: Barcelona, which is "like a lady of the world, admires and is admired, knows herself to be beautiful, and shows her secrets and charms with a certain vanity. Her voice and strength come from all the anonymous women who sustain her yesterday and today."In a leap to 1888, the year of the Universal Exhibition, The Flight of Urania(Urania's Escape) by Susanna Rafart weaves the adventures of incipient photographers who capture every moment, of misery and industrialization, of progress and imposture. The protagonist, a frustrated painter, Eugeni Bellavista, dedicates himself to gallant photography and exposes these contradictions. And it is that, according to the author, "Barcelona has always been a city that exposes itself to the external gaze." A city, she adds, that "like a lady of the world, admires and is admired, knows itself to be beautiful, and shows its secrets and charms with a certain vanity. Its voice and strength come from all the anonymous women who sustain it yesterday and today."
Julià de Jòdar, who fictionalized a peripheral neighborhood of Barcelona in the post-war 1940s and 1950s in the celebrated trilogy L'atzar i les ombres (Chance and Shadows), in the clearest example of what a fiction of today's Catalonia of Der Prozess could be, this time attacks the year 1929. To do this, he recovers the figure of Gregori Salicrú, who arrived in Can Tunis to work in a metallurgical laboratory. There, experiments are carried out with the most miserable workers to achieve a supposed 'Metallurgical Superman'. The required parallel with Frankenstein is evident. The author travels through a Barcelona in the midst of the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship, in which he sees current reflections such as "economic elites subordinated to the Spanish State in crisis and a rising republican Catalanism."
After the Civil War, the city of 1968 appears. Ernest, son of a bourgeois family complicit with Francoism, becomes part of the anti-Francoist university movements and even experiences the famous May of that year in Paris, whose scope we still debate on its fiftieth anniversary. The author of this novel, which appears coinciding with the month of the French uproar, is Jordi Coca. The writer finds that the Barcelona of then had nothing to do with that of now. And he argues, "one of the great changes is the human and cultural physiognomy: in the sixties everything was more homogeneous, there were not as many contrasts as now; another difference is that written and spoken Catalan still moved almost in clandestinity. And we longed for democracy, convinced that a different political system would guarantee us happiness."
In autumn and winter, the last three novels of the 'Matar el monstre' project, in which the City Council has collaborated, will take place in Barcelona in 1992, 2004, and 2018. It will increasingly approach the city of lifestyle, business, talent, and added value. A city that, says Castells, "as always keeps going and progresses based on urban planning bets that transform it," with the contribution of "the spark of resistance that we still have," adds Rafart, with "less naivety than half a century ago," points out Coca, and all this within the framework, according to Jòdar, of the contrast between "urbanism and speculation with housing and evictions."
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