Books

The traveller A mildly deranged vision

A lesbian detective is hired by a glamorous woman, Frankie, who is in fact a transsexual to look for her husband, Ben, who turns out to be a woman. It is (you've guessed right) a comedy about sexual identity

My name is Cas­san­dra Reilly and I don't live any­where,” Bar­bara Wil­son's nar­ra­tor de­clares in the first line. The up­front state­ment sets the tone for Cas­san­dra, Irish-Amer­i­can ad­ven­turer who works when she needs the cash as a de­tec­tive or trans­la­tor (if only a trans­la­tor's life were so ex­cit­ing).

This is no mur­der mys­tery. It is a crime story with barely a crime. There is an ap­par­ent kid­nap­ping, but it is not re­ally a kid­nap­ping. Frankie of­fers Cas­san­dra a lot of cash in Lon­don to search for her hus­band in Barcelona, but she has not told Cas­san­dra the truth and nor does any­one else. Cas­san­dra is happy to travel to Barcelona, where she can catch up with old friends and lovers, trans­late and work for Frankie. It sounds ideal, but soon be­comes a night­mare. No-one, but no-one is who she seems to be. The not very be­liev­able plot soon lost me, just as it seems to have lost Cas­san­dra, but the de­tec­tive's swag­ger and the book's en­ergy kept me read­ing.

Sex and satire

Pub­lished 25 years ago, Gaudí Af­ter­noon is a novel of its time, though the title gives a hu­mor­ous nod to­wards Dorothy Say­ers' finest and most fem­i­nist novel Gaudy Night (1935). Bar­bara Wil­son has writ­ten a comic ad­ven­ture story with the un­der­ly­ing pur­poses of af­firm­ing les­bian iden­tity and the di­ver­sity of sex­u­al­ity. Cas­san­dra is as promis­cu­ous as any male stud, but she is sen­si­tive to her women's feel­ings (if we take her word for it). Her life-style is the envy of many: trav­el­ling the world with a girl-friend in every port.

Se­ri­ous as Wil­son is about her sex­ual pol­i­tics, she has a re­fresh­ingly satir­i­cal eye. Among her tar­gets are New Age mas­sages with April, whom Cas­san­dra fan­cies; the up­tight ar­chi­tect of chil­dren's houses, Ana, who fan­cies Cas­san­dra; or Car­men, an An­dalu­sian Catholic hair­dresser (the book's most vivid char­ac­ter) who has a tor­rid re­la­tion­ship with Cas­san­dra, but re­li­gious ‘prin­ci­ples' al­ways pre­vent her going all the way.

Wil­son also takes on the fad for magic re­al­ism. Through­out the book Cas­san­dra is trans­lat­ing the mas­sive, por­ten­tous and pre­ten­tious “The Big One and her Daugh­ter” by Glo­ria de los An­ge­les, “the fifth au­thor to be dubbed ‘the new fe­male García Márquez'”. The chunks of mag­i­cally real text are one of the best jokes in the book.

Evok­ing Barcelona

Wil­son re­ally knows Barcelona. She first came in 1970 and found parts of the old quar­ter still derelict: “every­thing reeked –in de­scend­ing order, air to stone pave­ment— of wet black cloth­ing on the line, olive oil, gar­lic, harsh to­bacco, and piss.” Then she dis­cov­ered Park Güell and the “mag­i­cal and mildly de­ranged vi­sion of An­toni Gaudí.”

Both the run-down old city and Gaudí's build­ings are strong pres­ences in the novel. Wil­son records the joys of the seedy pre-Olympic city of the 1980s, re­cent, still in liv­ing mem­ory, but lost. Her pas­sion re­minds me of Vázquez Mon­talbán propos­ing, not en­tirely as a joke, that the City Coun­cil open a Mu­seum of Smells, to con­serve the mem­ory of a city being mod­ernised and sani­tised out of recog­ni­tion.

Wil­son gives us the Plaça Real, the sweat-filled bars, greasy streets, half-de­mol­ished ten­e­ments, or the no-star Hotel Pala­cio: “A dirty wooden stair­case led up to a small lobby on the sec­ond floor, where a pair of pinched sis­ters glared at me.” At the mar­ket's “icy stands of fish…, the fish­mon­gers looked as pale as their catch from long years of sun­less fil­let­ing and wrap­ping.” She is a sharp de­scrip­tive writer.

The re­li­gious con­ser­v­a­tive Gaudí, though, is the sur­prise pro­tag­o­nist of this fem­i­nist novel. Nu­mer­ous scenes refer to his build­ings and Wil­son has se­ri­ously good ex­pla­na­tions of his ar­chi­tec­ture. Here is Cas­san­dra re­flect­ing on the Park Güell: “The crazy thing about Gaudí was that his struc­tures were so ab­solutely sound, per­fect parabo­las ca­pa­ble of bear­ing enor­mous weight, and yet his sur­faces were so ir­reg­u­lar. They gave the ap­pear­ance of being nat­ural, of hav­ing been part of the planet for mil­len­nia, and at the same time looked com­pletely new, com­pletely un­like any­thing you'd seen be­fore.”

Gaudí's sleights of hand fit well with the shift­ing sex­ual iden­ti­ties of her char­ac­ters. Just as Cas­san­dra is un­sure who is who and sex­ual iden­ti­ties are fluid, so Gaudí's stone may flow into a tree-trunk and his curves place na­ture in city-cen­tre build­ings more ef­fec­tively than any pot­ted plant can. Much of the ac­tion takes place in a flat in the dirty, run-down La Pe­dr­era, be­fore it was spruced up by Caixa Catalunya 30 years ago.

Gaudí Af­ter­noon is a very like­able book, full of bad and good jokes. A ro­man­tic com­edy, with pace and no pomp, but some se­ri­ous in­tent. It ends with one last joke on sex role re­ver­sal. A man and a woman think they might have a child to­gether.

“Hamil­ton blushed. – It's a lit­tle un­con­ven­tional, but I think it may work.”


Born in Long Beach, Cal­i­for­nia, in 1950, Bar­bara Wil­son was brought up in a Chris­t­ian Sci­ence fam­ily, de­scribed in her har­row­ing 1998 mem­oir Blue Win­dows. She dis­cusses the com­plex con­flict be­tween re­li­gion and re­al­ity. Her mother died after re­fus­ing med­ical treat­ment for can­cer.

Child of the 1960s, she trav­elled widely through Eu­rope, es­cap­ing both her fam­ily and a United States at war. She ex­plains in her pow­er­ful Incog­nito Street, How Travel made me a Writer (2006) that the chal­lenge to un­der­stand new places stim­u­lated her writ­ing. Com­pul­sive reader and writer, she was al­ways record­ing where she was. Boldly she tried out dif­fer­ent styles, im­i­tat­ing other writ­ers be­fore her own voice emerged.

She set­tled in Seat­tle in 1974, the year when she co-founded the fem­i­nist Seal Press. Like Cas­san­dra Reilly, she worked as a lit­er­ary trans­la­tor, but from Nor­we­gian, not Span­ish. She founded the Women in Trans­la­tion Press in 1989.

In the 1980s, she wrote three mys­ter­ies fea­tur­ing a Seat­tle printer Pam Nilsen. Gaudí Af­ter­noon, win­ner of a Lambda Award for Best Les­bian Mys­tery 1991, is the first of four Cas­san­dra Reilly books, all set in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. In 2001 it was made into a Hol­ly­wood film.

In the early 2000s she spent sev­eral win­ters in north­ern Nor­way, in­ves­ti­gat­ing the Sami peo­ple. Around that time she began to be known as Bar­bara Sjo­holm and today has a strong rep­u­ta­tion as a writer of cre­ative non-fic­tion, in­clud­ing The Pi­rate Queen about women who went to sea. She is au­thor to date of some 25 pub­lished books, listed and sum­marised on her web-site www.​bar​bara​sjoh​olm.​com.

Gaudí Afternoon Author: Barbara Wilson Publisher: Open Road Media Pages: 172 Translator and amateur detective Cassandra Reilly travels to Barcelona in search of a missing man—but finds much more than she bargained for.
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