Preview: 'Voyage al sur', unpublished book by Juan Marsé
Opinion of Iñaki Ellakuría: The writer pointed out by Catalan nationalism
Obituary: The writer Juan Marsé dies at the age of 87: that boy who invented Barcelona
Profile.Juan Marsé: sociology, communist militancy and other class confusions
Juan Marsé imposed an exploratory discipline without moving too much from his jurisdiction.
He circled his days for a year and left the minutes of that time in a journal and other loose notes.
In 2003 he warmed up the spirits and began 2004 with a notebook where he can leave a trace of a diary that portrays the intimacy (with immediacy) of one of the most resounding writers of the second half of the 20th century in Spain.
That was a particularly terrible year, with the attacks of March 11 in M
adrid. There were elections. There was a war (against Iraq). There was a tsunami (in Asia)
.
He stood out from the result of the Planeta Prize as a member of the jury that year.
And his script for Fernando Trueba came to nothing.
A whole time of astonishment, anger and shaking, but it is also possible to trace here the worlds of Marsé that come out of his childhood, make a nest in Barcelona and then return to himself in a prodigious flight with which he rebuilds a city, a bourgeoisie, some losers and another life that is theirs, have here their domestic counterpoint.
His little enthusiasms, his many disappointments, his vitriolic streak
.
Is he
One Year Diary
.
And more than a freediving dive is swimming short, precise, concrete strokes. Once the adventure was over, Marsé put the notebook in a folder.
He did not show it.
Nor did he insist on gender.
He did not take it as good or bad.
They were just notes.
Some time later, in three three notebooks, he regained his interest in scoring.
But they were loose fragments, without the will to work in progress, without discipline.
Between 2006 and 2019, he kept those notebooks running, which when he died, in 2020, were unpublished.
Now Lumen recovers that material in
a volume that has something of a laboratory, a secret magnifying glass, a cabinet
:
Notes for a memoir I'll never write
, edited, prefaced and annotated by Ignacio Echevarría. From these pages, Marsé's outline remains (even) somewhat sharper.
And the last section of his biography will be better understood.
They are not confessions, but notes to the natural of the natural: literature, cinema, journalism, politics, Catalonia and Spain, memories, sentences, poems, diatribes, disappointments, fatigue, joys, the family ... A sheaf of impressions where there is a manifesto attached: do not lower your guard, do not accept what is coming just because it comes.
Rebel when necessary.
Knowing that a "no" also multiplies.
Note of April 21, 2016: "
Sometimes I have doubts about whether the independence of Catalonia, which I have never wanted or supported, would perhaps be convenient, desirable and just
.
What I have no doubt about is that the Catalan patriots who promote it today are perfect carcamales and do not deserve the least respect. "In these pages there are also memories and presents abound. There are also judgments of the moment. As in this entry on Saturday 2 October 2004: "I just saw some of those thirty-odd children killed in Baghdad.
If I was Iraqi
If I lived in Baghdad, I would take a rifle and go out to kill the so-called allies
.
What the Iraqi people have suffered, what they are suffering, we will all have to pay for one day.
Rodrigo and the Galician are coming: masonry work.
Suso.
Guille, Berta and Gastón are coming. "And this one from 2016:" I have always taken care of any identity contamination that implies any patriotic emotion.
I am not a nationalist of any kind or fervor, my little homeland is a vineyard with a carob tree and an irrigated raft in the Penedés, where I bathed naked when I was a child. "Friends, family, scraps of a day. Work, small pleasures, your dog
Simon
.
The doctors, the cinema and the discomforts.
This Marsé here, between Barcelona and Calafell, shoots against so much cardboard-papier-mâché falsehood
while listening to himself grow old, without lowering his guard, making language an identity extracted from the best noise in the street, as at the beginning, as always.
And so on until the end, where there is a conscious line of the terrible: "I am beginning to feel faint, unbound and out of print."
It was October 9, 2018. It never lost its authenticity.
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