Vanessa Graell Barcelona
Barcelona
Updated Wednesday, January 24, 2024-14:52
Trilogy of modern Spain "Spain goes on its own and always on the wrong path"
About the Transition "Politicians were heroes capable of overcoming their differences"
He goes down Rambla de Catalunya with an elegant and carefree walk, between the
Parisian
flâneur and the British
gentelman
:
a cosmopolitan type
, although it is a disused word that long ago stopped defining his
Barcelona of wonders
and that not even he uses in his latest book, a quixotic diversion set right here, in the heart of Eixample in 2022.
After closing his trilogy about modern Spain -from Francoism to the symbolic year 2000-,
Eduardo Mendoza
surprises with
Three Enigmas for the Organization
(in Seix Barral, as always), one of his craziest novels starring nine!
secret agents with names like Buscabrega, Pocorrabo, Monososo or La Boni.
With the disappearance of the skipper of a luxury yacht and a mysterious death in a small hotel on Las Ramblas, a book begins that becomes more surreal with each chapter, in which prostitutes from the East and nuns, a false Pope from Rome, a taxi driver with police pretenses or a group of sailors without a boat who sink their sorrows in a bar counter.
When he published his last book, he said that perhaps he should retire, that he was in the 21st century as a "guest at a party that is not his own"... In the end he ended up writing about this century. In the end, no.
The next day!
But yes, when I said it really what I thought, that you have to retire on time.
Like the bullfighters, the singers, the soccer players... And it happened to me like it did to them: when I said I had to retire I thought, now what do I do with what I have left of my life?
Because I don't know how to do anything else.
I think I could entertain myself by walking, reading and watching series, but it gave me a bit of a headache.
So I started this book, which is made a bit without a plan, without a project, without a goal, without anything... But he had a great time... I would say that along with 'Gurb' this is one of the most fun books of him. That's right!
I have written three books this way.
The first was
The Mystery of the Haunted Crypt
(1978), because I was stuck with a book that didn't come out,
The City of Wonders
(1986).
So I stopped and to entertain myself I wrote the first thing that came to mind: all in a row, without thinking and without the intention of publishing.
The second,
No news from Gurb
(1991), was a summer series for a newspaper and I thought that when I finished it no one would ever read it again, therefore I could indulge in any nonsense. And yet, they are two of the books those his readers have the most affection for. Well, yes.
And the ones that have lasted the longest: they are still sold and they are still read, I don't know why.
With
Three Enigmas for the Organization
I don't know what will happen, but I don't care.
My career is closed and I am a retiree who loves writing.
I started writing thinking that no one was going to read it and when I realized it was 400 pages long...
"I don't know what will happen with this book but I don't care. My career is closed and I am a retiree who loves writing"
Is this the most quixotic of your books?
I'm referring above all to the crazy characters he builds... I think they're all the same.
My characters are always unfortunate, marginalized, aliens... There are different categories.
I get them to do things and they do them their own way, everything else is secondary.
In this book his activity is police and detective.
Then there is their private life and when they are at home they are all a human catastrophe: the child doing homework while the father's macaroni burns, the one who wants to get married but is a company girl... [brief silence, shakes her head and continues ] That's it, if there is nothing more to say about this book... Interviews make me uncomfortable because sometimes I don't know what to say. Well, in the book there are moments that border on political incorrectness... Yes, yes, yes , yes... [funny, like the child who makes a prank]...for example, the conversation in a brothel in La Junquera with a Lilliputian madame.
They could almost cancel him! [laughs, scoundrel, like the child whose prank has gone well] But well... what's the bad thing?
There are madams and there are Lilliputians.
She already says it.
Can't a madame be a Lilliputian?
A hunchback also appears... You have to go where the trouble is, because otherwise it's all nun jokes. What do you think of the
woke
wave and cancellation in literature? I think there is a basis of reason and justice.
Traditionally, physical defects have been used a lot as a joke.
Women have always been an object of ridicule,
gays
have been a toy... All that had to change.
That we have fallen to the opposite extreme?
Yes, but we had to clean the house a little.
Because you read things now and your mouth is open... Like what? All classical Spanish literature is based on making fun of women.
Except
Don Quixote
, who doesn't make fun of anyone, except him.
But everything else, including Cervantes' other works, is based on the portrayal of women as capricious, stupid, wasteful, dirty, ugly... And that is to make people laugh.
It is also true that they did not realize it.
Just like all the Jews were usurers with their noses that reached the ground... Or the blacks were laughable because they were very stupid and very clumsy.
"The classics of Spanish literature portray women as capricious, stupid, wasteful, dirty, ugly..."
Do you think there is a lack of humor in current literature? If I were not so modest, I would say that I have contributed to humor returning to its place in the bookstore, next to normal books and not in a discarded section.
There was a time when humor was a little cornered despite the long tradition that exists in Spain.
Before the war there was a very good comedy theater.
Then he continued with Miguel Mihura, the films of Berlanga or Azcona, who is a great comedian.
But literature had to be very serious and dramatic.
A major award had never been given to a comedian.
The first Cervantes prize for a crazy person is mine. You have written about all the Barcelonas: the modernist one of the 19th century, the 20th century and now the 21st.
Which...It's the same.
Like all cities, it changes and adapts.
Although strange things have happened to Barcelona. Strange things? If you think about it, it is one of the few cities that has gone from being unknown in the world, like Wuppertal (Germany), which is an important city with many inhabitants but Nobody knows what it's like... It has gone from being a second-class European city to being an international tourist reference, with the entire Barcelona brand.
Gaudí was an unfortunate man who no one paid attention to, if there was a bingo in La Pedrera!
Nobody went to the Sagrada Familia and whoever went entered, went up and took a stone home.
Suddenly everything changed, what was ugly becomes beautiful and touristy.
It's a very interesting phenomenon, something I saw in New York: it was an ugly and dirty city that no one wanted to go to, not even jokingly.
And then it became the most wonderful city in the world.
Singapore was a place full of garbage and people eating in the streets with their fingers.
Now it is paradise on earth.
Barcelona has also changed, but it is a fairly small and controllable city, which has not been so subject to major economic, social and political ups and downs...
"Gaudí was an unfortunate man who no one paid attention to, if there was a bingo in La Pedrera!"
Have there really been no political ups and downs? No.
He has contracted skin diseases but they have not affected the most important viscera.
[sighs] I am often asked my position and I have already said it many times: I do not believe that the
process
has influenced Barcelona.
It's like confinement, it's over and the next day everything is the same again.
That there is a conflict that will arise again, a problem poorly managed on one side and the other?
Yes. But the
process
has not changed Barcelona. You experienced the amnesty of 1979. How do you evaluate the one that Pedro Sánchez is promoting? After the Franco regime it was necessary to put things in their place and the legal form of amnesty was given, with which many chorizos took to the streets.
But it was not exactly what is understood by an amnesty, which is a grace that is granted to a series of people because they are not considered so dangerous... That is the current amnesty, it is very similar to that of the year 34, with the October Events.
It was exactly the same.
It was a very turbulent time.
There was a declaration of independence, it lasted a few hours and Companys and everyone went to prison for a couple of years until they were released.
There are photos of him in prison like this, clinging to the bars.
It was nonsense, they were taught.
They tell us 'Ho tornarem a fer' (We will do it again).
No, he who has been in prison for a few years becomes very good and orderly.
"The
process
is like confinement, it's over, the next day everything is the same again"
Not everyone has been in jail. The amnesty doesn't seem like such a big scandal to me and I don't understand why it has been received as something so offensive and shameful, such a big betrayal of I don't know what... I was totally against everything. independence or nationalist movement, not because I believe that the unity of the country is important, but because it seemed like a bad deal to me.
Like Brexit.
I don't care about the British Empire and the European Union, but it seemed to me that they were getting into a mess of which we are now seeing the consequences, not only on a political and financial level.
You go to a supermarket and there are no fruits and vegetables because they all came from Spain, France and Italy, now you have some very expensive crap.
They have lost everything: the subsidies, the people who came... It's nonsense.
With historical causes?
I do not know!
The only story that interests me is today's. In his previous trilogy there was some background touch on the "utopia of Catalan nationalism."
There is not a single reference in this book. There were two topics that I didn't want to touch on because they were coming out of my ears: confinement and the process.
We are oversaturated.
Books are still coming out about what happened to people in confinement.
Hey, it was horribly boring, everyone watching bad television series and having a good time... But there hasn't yet been a book by a nurse that tells what happened, only books about 'I'm at home, I don't know what to do, I'm watching.' through the window and there is no one, instead you can hear the little birds.' In fact, in your book there is a certain resistance to entering the 21st century.
His detectives do not use cell phones, only fax, and send coded messages through a nightly radio program.
Do you also resist? In practice, no.
But deep down I am a man of the 20th century.
I haven't entered the mobile phone.
Yes, I look at it all day and do solitaires... But I'm a visitor.
It is also true that although they make fun of me, I belong to the pioneers and conquerors who started with the first computers at home.
Learning that was not obvious.
That you pressed a button and everything was deleted and you couldn't get it back... Have you ever had a book deleted? The whole thing, no.
But a complete chapter, yes.
I have lost many things but that is part of the process.
Losing is also part of writing. His book begins in the center of Barcelona, with a very vivid and fresh description of the showcase city and the floods of tourists.
Do you think that the city has lost a certain essence? Las Ramblas, La Boqueria..., we have sold out on these places but it doesn't seem so dramatic to me.
I don't mean this as a criticism.
We have sold the center like we have sold the coast and the beaches.
But the European proletariat has to bathe somewhere. And where does the Barcelona proletariat bathe? Also in Barceloneta.
I wish Barcelona had 50 inhabitants, all rich and handsome, but look, there are two million of us, ugly and poor.
And now what are you writing?
He's going to tell me nothing, but in a couple of years he'll have a new novel...Writing writing, no... But I'm preparing things, I have backlogged essays, which I put aside because novels are more fun for me.
And courses that I gave and that I would like to write about.
Say one about realism in fiction, in literature and also in cinema.
I think I was my only student because the others didn't listen, but I kept saying to myself 'look, what I'm saying I should think about carefully and write it down because it's interesting'.
It is about reflecting on what we believe: to what extent do we accept what is absurd as good?
Once you accept one thing, Dracula is realism, but with certain conditions: sleeping in a coffin, going out at night... The concept of what the reality of fiction entails is what interests me, what I have always thought about. .