'The yin and yang business'. "In the Transition all politicians were heroes capable of overcoming their differences"
When he takes the key out of his pocket and opens a door, the only one on the street, it seems as if Eduardo Mendoza were one of his characters, like behind a haunted crypt or a clandestine meeting of anarchists or the prince of a kingdom that has never existed. . But it is the writer's garden: an urban oasis where autumn has not yet arrived. The first robins are coming. And among the plants some turtles hide (they were his son's pets). Since the pandemic began, Mendoza has left London to return home, to that Barcelona that writes from the foot of Tibidabo.
He reissues 'Las barbas del propeta', an ironic essay with biographical touches.
Are you trying to count the Bible as a literary myth?
The Bible is a book of extraordinary quality but it is almost never considered a literary work because of its great religious load.
What if you forget and read it like the Iliad?
I have always been interested in the literary training that one acquires before even knowing it: children's and youth readings and these things that they taught us at school in a very strange way, because not even they knew why they told us the story of Jonah and the whale .
I speak of the Bible as a source of stories and creator of great foundational myths of our way of understanding the world, sometimes with cruelty and violence.
In your contemporary parallels, do you see Daniel's prophecies as a precursor to 'Game of Thrones'? As Greek or Christian mythology disappears from teaching, education becomes a very prosaic and practical thing.
People have a need for myths and they buy them on Netflix or HBO.
The Bible, like the Nibelungs or the Olympian gods, responds to a spiritual need.
They speak of beings who rule destiny, the exploits of Hercules or Samson matter to us.
Those of Game of Thrones, no.
They're going to entertain and that's how we're done. Are myths missing in today's society? Symbols are needed.
But sometimes the symbol is confused with what it represents.
Now we discuss whether the monarchy makes sense.
I don't know what we are talking about: the symbol, an element that for centuries served to cohesive society or the practical utility of a political institution?
We must be careful with myths because they get into our home and are confused with winter clothes.What other myths get into the house? Political myths, such as ideas of homeland and units of destiny, that are of late fashion.
In England they are smarter: they use their imperial mythology to make great television series like The Crown or the Tudors and not attack each other.
Here, do a series on Philip II or IV?
To put them right or wrong, it doesn't matter ... Shakespeare leaves them all like gangsters but builds a kind of Olympus with some very bad kings who poison and murder, but they have a size.
Not us. Is it taboo to play history in Spain?
History is hijacked by the English, they write it.
The Civil War is owned by Paul Preston, Hugh Thomas, Gabriel Jackson ... You tell the history of the city in your novels.
"To say Barcelona is to say Mendoza", highlighted the jury of the Barcino Prize for Historical Novels.
I have never done a historical novel as such, which is a genre in itself.
Although it is true that the borders are increasingly blurred and that in my books there is a weight of history.
If Montalbán walks around Barcelona, I see it from Tibidabo, in a historical evolution, between the aerial perspective and the newspaper archive.
In the 1970s, that line was almost virgin terrain.
Then it coincided with the take-off of Barcelona: it went from an almost unknown city to a world reference, which is a very interesting phenomenon. Do you think the image of Barcelona has changed after the independence process? I am increasingly convinced that nationalism is a firework more than one thing that will weigh in the history of Catalonia.
It continually reappears and no one has had the imagination or the ability to take it seriously.
It comes from two or more centuries ago.
Unamuno, Ortega or Azaña have already tried it.
But it has been done wrong.
There is a difficult marriage that needs counseling and rethinking its relationships.
Apart from that, changes are happening that in the long run will be more important. He has always said that he liked living in London because it gave him distance to observe and analyze what is happening in Spain.
And now that he's here, it doesn't matter now.
In the past, I have always been in and out, more outside than inside.
It gives a very useful perspective.
Sometimes people find things normal that surprise me and vice versa: they are scandalized by what happens here but, hey, you don't know what happens outside.
We have a kind of negative lens.
But look at what is happening in other countries ... For example, the rise of populism? Yes, although less here.
We are quite vaccinated against extremism on one side and the other.
There are concepts that can move people en masse and individually in other countries but that are difficult to place here.
The Make America great again, what would it be?
We hardly believe it.
There is more bravado than greatness.
The grandeur of the French or the superior race does not penetrate.
You can always use localisms: The best chorizo is from my town.
But leaving the leg level would cost us more.
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