Close to the truth

Liv­ing Writ­ers

Juan Marsé’s tale (“A De­tec­tive Story”) of lost kids play­ing among the ruins in the af­ter­math of the Civil War (though the fine photo ac­com­pa­ny­ing it is of the beach, not the hills where the story is set) strikes the themes of much of his lit­er­a­ture: nos­tal­gia for bro­ken fu­tures, the cin­ema as es­cape, chil­dren trau­ma­tised by the war, cops every­where, women dri­ven by poverty to pros­ti­tu­tion and men to sui­cide, fa­thers ab­sent in jail or exile. I am prej­u­diced in his favour (lit­er­ar­ily, not po­lit­i­cally). Marsé’s fine story should stim­u­late read­ers to look for the nov­els of one of the great­est liv­ing Cata­lan writ­ers. In the sub­tle story (“Three Steps”) by Miquel Molina that fol­lows, the novel-lov­ing main char­ac­ter vis­its a typ­i­cal Marsé scene and finds it is now over­run by tourists. The oc­ca­sional grimy post-war bar has given way to restau­rants now serv­ing “some kind of ex­otic cui­sine.” Marsé him­self then ap­pears, warn­ing the nar­ra­tor that his (Marsé’s) book is just fic­tion. Hero-wor­ship is un­healthy, but, as Cer­vantes noted, good fic­tion “comes close to the truth”.

An­other plea­sure of an an­thol­ogy is to dis­cover writ­ers un­known to the reader. C.A. Jor­dana’s “Blitz on Barcelona” is the book’s Civil War story, but one that de­fies ex­pec­ta­tion. This is no bru­tally re­al­ist story of bombs and slaugh­ter, as the title sug­gests, but rather three sketches: of the moon on a night enemy planes are fly­ing, a hos­pi­tal and a bar. Its orig­i­nal­ity made me turn at once to the mini-bi­ogra­phies of the au­thors at the end to find out more about Jor­dana.

There are sev­eral other liv­ing writ­ers, younger than Marsé (now 86), to­ward the end of this chrono­log­i­cally or­dered book. Jordi Nopca weaves a tale of in­dus­tri­ous mi­grants from China who be­come in­volved with dif­fi­cult neigh­bours after open­ing a bar. Najat el Hachmi has an­other tale on the con­flicts of mi­gra­tion (“The Sound of Keys”). Two young North African women move to a Barcelona flat, flee­ing from their par­ents and four broth­ers in a Cata­lan town where the women have to do all the work. As al­ways a fine, in­tel­li­gent writer, she draws out the dif­fer­ing re­ac­tions of the women to their new-found free­dom in this sec­ond mi­gra­tion.

In an­other story of mi­gra­tion, Empar Mo­liner, a pas­sion­ate con­trib­u­tor to Catalunya Ràdio af­ter­noons as well as a writer of acid sto­ries, sub­dues her usual ex­u­ber­ance for a dra­matic re­port on class and ex­ploita­tion. She de­scribes a “mar­ket” in a con­vent where the upper class can hire South-Amer­i­can maids and car­ers for about 600 euros a month.

The ut­terly con­vinc­ing ob­nox­ious pro­tag­o­nist of Quim Monzó’s “The Boy Who was Sure to Die” ex­em­pli­fies how low an opin­ion this great short-story writer has of hu­mans. Lone­li­ness in the mod­ern city and un­tame­able self­ish­ness are the themes of his deeply heart­felt sto­ries about heart­less peo­ple. Jorge Carrión’s cameo is a nice re­flec­tion on sounds and si­lence: dead lan­guages, a mute cat, par­rots that go dumb in old age and lo­qua­cious taxi-dri­vers who don’t.

One can al­ways think of some omis­sions when read­ing an an­thol­ogy. Where is so-and-so? Why wasn’t this beloved story in­cluded? There can be lit­tle com­plaint, though, about these four­teen tales, set in dif­fer­ent areas of Barcelona, from the Mon­tjuïc to the Carmel hills, from the Ram­bla to the Eix­am­ple and Gràcia. They re­veal how this in­dus­trial port city has been and is a mag­net for mi­grants. They show the class di­vi­sions be­tween areas. They trace, too, the de­vel­op­ment of mod­ern Cata­lan lit­er­a­ture in both Cata­lan and Span­ish. Cer­vantes is the rich­est of aper­i­tifs, but the main menu starts, after cen­turies of de­cline and re­pres­sion, with the nine­teenth-cen­tury re­turn to a vig­or­ous lit­er­a­ture, an artis­tic re­nais­sance ac­com­pa­ny­ing Cat­alo­nia’s po­lit­i­cal and eco­nomic re­naixença.