[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: September 29, 2008]
At the beginning of September, I celebrated a number of Barcelona novelists whose work is fairly easily found in English translation: Eduardo Mendoza, Mercè Rodoreda and Manuel Vazquez Montalbán.
I wanted to supplement that with a handful of reading suggestions for anyone who wants a deeper knowledge of the city than that provided by Frommer's, Time Out or the Rough Guide.
For better or worse, most non-fiction studies of Barcelona deal with the Civil War years when the city was the nexus of the struggle for power among the various leftist groups - Soviet-sponsored, Trotskyist and anarchist - soon to be overrun in any case by Franco's insurgent fascist army.
Certainly, Franco's abiding hostility to Barcelona and the Catalan language is an essential historical context to understanding any portrait of the city, including the novels formerly recommended.
Going beyond the war, for any English language reader who wants to delve into Catalunya's cultural as well as historical heritage, there is no substitute for Robert Hughes' Barcelona (1992). The only conceivable objection to this master-piece of cultural history is that at around six hundred pages, it's hard to carry around (his Barcelona The Great Enchantress is a "pared-down" version of the original - and indeed, it's much shorter - but I haven't used it).
Hughes is, of course, primarily an art critic and historian, and indeed the seeds for the Barcelona book lay in the much more restricted project of writing about aspects of the city's modernista architecture.
Far from being an outcrop of the European modernist movement in art, architecture and letters, Barcelona's modernisme was a movement with deeply conservative roots, drawing sustenance from Catalunyan myths and legends as well as from a kind of imaginative Catholicism. Gaudí may appear to be designing sets for Star Wars, but he was much more concerned with the symbolic significance of Saint George (St. Jordi, the city's patron saint) and with penance for what he viewed as the city's past anti-clerical excesses.
It comes as a surprise to those who associate Barcelona primarily with anti-fascist activism to learn that its greatest historical artists, Gaudí and the poet Verdaguer, were fanatically devout (if strange) Catholic traditionalists. After reading Hughes, this will never seem strange again. He sets Catalunya's architecture, as well as its movements in painting and literature, against a panoramic historic background, reaching back to the city's founding, and the stories of its first great warrior king, Guifré (known in English, I'm afraid, as Wilfrid the Hairy).
Hughes combines his huge learning with a crisp, colloquial style:
"Personally, I can attest that since I first sat down in one of its cafés in 1966, nothing bad has ever happened to me in Plaça Reial, but what is true for bulky Australians does not necessarily apply to every size or sex of visitor."
This bulky volume contains definitive English language portraits of just about every major building, museum, artist, architect, or writer of Barcelona which you could conceivably need to research. The chapter on Gaudí - "The Hermit in the Cave of Making" - is masterly. You can also find everything you need to know about the jocs florals, about the influential cleric Torres i Bages, about the Catalan choral tradition, and about the nineteenth century anarchist movement. And doubtless it's all a little too much for the casual reader: but every great city should have a book like this.
A much shorter, more impressionistic account of the city is given by the Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, in Homage to Barcelona (1990), which gathers his experience of living in the city into a series of themed chapters. Tóibín is a poetic writer, and he has an unusual viewpoint: he's both an outsider, and at the same time someone who, engaged with his own celtic heritage, has a personal investment in the issues of cultural identity and independence faced by the Catalans.
He doesn't merely pass through the city, observing. He lives there, he speaks Catalan, he has Catalan friends. This book gives the English reader unique insight into what it was like to be of that generation of Catalans which emerged from Franco's shadow and transformed Barcelona into a world center for style, design and nightlife. His chapters on nightclubbing and on food (and sex) can stand endless re-reading:
"Where did you eat? they would ask, and I would mention L'Egipte at the back of the Boqueria market; I would say that Iusually went there on Saturday at lunch-time. And that would meet with general approval. Or I would say that I went to El Pla de la Graça on Carrer Assaonadors for cheese and pâté and a bottle of red wine. And that too would provoke a positive reaction."
Of course, don't rely on a 1990 book for current restaurant recommendations.
Finally, a harder to find book (in English), and perhaps one for true enthusiasts: Manuel Vazquez Montalbán's Barcelonas. Montalbán was a Barcelona native, but wrote in Castilian Spanish. His concerns are political and social as much as cultural, and he offers an insider's view of the tensions between left and right in Catalunya from the Civil War period through to the post-Franco era and the Olympics. He's excellent on the city's physical growth and expansion over the years, but the final chapter - on rambling around the city's sights - is disappointingly short.
Now what I really need to find is his book on Catalan cooking in English translation.
Robert Hughes, Barcelona. Harvill (UK edition), Knopf (US edition), 1992.
Colm Tóibín, Homage to Barcelona. Simon and Schuster, 1990. Re-issed by Picador, 2002.
Manuel Vazquez Montalbán, Barcelonas. Verso, London, 1992. (At time of writing, inexpensive used copies of this rare book can be found at www.abebooks.com.)