The houses of letters

Since the Lower Paleolithic, different administrations (municipal and national) have promised citizens the creation of a project called Casa de les Lletres; that is, a cultural facility where, theory had it, various associations dedicated to the creation and promotion of our literature would be housed. After decades of waiting – and doing justice to a typically Catalan phenomenon or, more specifically, an ancestral one in the universe of Plaça de Sant Jaume – this very week we discovered that Barcelona may end up having two homonymous projects. First, that of the Generalitat, which will be located in the Palau Requesens and will house the Institució de las Lletres Catalanes, the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres and writers' associations such as the AELC or PEN Català and other entities that for decades have occupied the fifth floor of my beloved Ateneu Barcelonès, saving themselves any kind of rent. You're welcome.

In parallel, the Barcelona City Council has reported that it maintains its project, located in the old Poblenou coach houses, but with a still uncertain future. Municipal authorities say that the evolution of the publishing sector forces them to rethink the place (it's a curious argument, because perhaps they should rethink less and work a little more). In any case, the new projects still have to face the reform of their respective heritage buildings, so the matter looks like it will take a long time. Be that as it may, and in this we have also followed a great tradition of the tribe, we will first activate the bricklayers while waiting for the cultural projects to impose themselves by the magical art of inertia. At the limit, the Generalitat's establishment is a sum of existing pieces (covered with empty concepts such as "book-dynamizing equipment") and the City Council's is limited to administrative silence.

With the spirit of helping administrations (you will forgive my petulance, but I know a little about thinking, rethinking, and compulsively reading), I would like to recall some very basic ideas. First: any Pla Nacional del Llibre i de la lectura, Casa de les Lletres and its aunt on a scooter passes, in the first instance, through improving our reading comprehension in Catalan. In this sense, the Generalitat has shown us a rather erratic policy, not only due to a highly improvable reaction to the PISA report results, but also because this week – in a clear example of misgovernance – it decided to cancel the reading comprehension tests given to our children to restore them in a hurry. The health of the language builds readers, the robustness of Catalan ensures the life of writers and publishers: without this factor, any other invention is pure rhetoric.

In parallel, and forgive me if it sounds demagogic, the best favor that can be done for quality literary creation in Catalan is to ensure that our writers can subsist on their work and that publishers generate profits. Public bureaucrats will tell me that book purchase and reading figures are increasing and that these new infrastructures will create incentives for people to read more and better and blah blah blah. But I devour many books and know the country's publishing system well (I'm talking about what goes beyond the complacency of Sant Jordi and the joy of cocktails after book presentations, where everything seems idyllic) and I can affirm that no one reads in Catalan and that our book companies perform miracles to make ends meet without dying in the attempt. This is not attributable to our creators, far from it, but to an increasingly meager reading base.

It places us in the delirious schizophrenia of a country where people contemplate in amazement first-world physical spaces with third-division content and projects