Hawking

On the 23rd of the month (Sant Jordi's Day) the streets and squares of towns and vil­lages all over Cat­alo­nia - Barcelona very much in­cluded - will once again be chock full of stalls sell­ing books for which many of us will will­ingly fork out to show our loved ones (be they lovers, fam­ily or friends) that we do in­deed, well, love them. Once again, large num­bers of writ­ers from here and a few from the rest of the world will be boxed in be­hind tres­tle ta­bles like so many bat­tery hens, on the qui vive for any­one who might want a vol­ume signed. This year, for the first time in four, I have a new book out and so will be boxed in too, and am al­ready hop­ing against hope that I won't be placed next to a TV star or an au­thor of crowd pleasers, whose im­mense queues tend to flank the dearth of pun­ters stretch­ing out in front of those of us whose books do not sell the best. And like all writ­ers who sign on Sant Jordi, I have re­cently been run­ning the usual gaunt­let of book pre­sen­ta­tions that lead up to the big day. This year, for ex­am­ple, thanks to more than a lit­tle help from my friends, the Barcelona pre­sen­ta­tion went well. But a week later I was in a city of a hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple of whom ex­actly three turned up. Two days later, in a town a tenth the size, I had an au­di­ence of forty or so. (The dif­fer­ences de­pend on a va­ri­ety of fac­tors: the or­ga­niz­ers, the weather, the day...). The week after, I was due to do a dual pre­sen­ta­tion in a big town in cen­tral Cat­alo­nia with a pres­ti­gious writer from French Cat­alo­nia: both of us as­sumed that we were going to make a lit­er­ary killing, but just two peo­ple turned up - one for each of us. Four days later I was in a book­shop in a tiny vil­lage near the Costa Brava, and there was stand­ing room only. At the time of writ­ing, the last stop has been An­dorra where, de­spite heavy rain­fall - which here keeps peo­ple at home as much as does a Barça match - a baker's dozen still braved the storm to make it to the local li­brary. While doing these un­pre­dictable rounds, I re­called some of the dis­as­ters of past years: a pre­sen­ta­tion which wasn't an­nounced at all any­where by the or­ga­niz­ers, with the un­sur­pris­ing re­sult that no­body came; or the one in which all the au­di­ence save four stood up and left be­cause they were sup­posed be in a ram­blers' club meet­ing and had en­tered the wrong room; or the never-to-be-for­got­ten one which the or­ga­niz­ers them­selves had com­pletely for­got­ten about until I slipped under the half-low­ered metal door of their premises and gave them a sur­prise. Every time I and oth­ers pre­sent a book, then, lit­tle won­der that we won­der if it's worth it, just as we won­der if it's worth it when we sit be­hind the ta­bles on Sant Jordi's Day, watch­ing passers-by pass us by. Know­ing full well that if and when­ever fu­ture books of ours come out, we'll go through the whole busi­ness again and again and again, with­out a shadow of a doubt .