Really informative chat with a guy who clearly knows his literature (and I don't just say that because because he's complimentary about my latest work here.)
Miguel de Cervantes - The Banks of Algeas/ The Great Sultana María de Zayas y Sotomayor - Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion Maria Dueñas- a Vineyard in Andalusia Salvador Dali, Marx brothers - Giraffes on Horseback Salad Gerald Brenan - South of Granada/ Spanish Labyrinth / The Literature of the Spanish People Almudena Grande - Ages of Lulu/ The Frozen Heart
"I found Brett's very personal account of his travels through Spain a moving and very rewarding read.
His affection for the country and its peoples shines through and his encounters with the people he meets on his travels avoid caricature and shallow conclusions.
He is clearly still discovering aspects of the country he loves and enjoying the opportunity to complete the picture."
"Two masters of the fanciful and philosophical, together..."
"For more than half a century, this unusual yet organic cross-pollination of genius remained an almost mythic artifact, reserved for collectors and scholars...
Random House commissioned surrealist kingpin Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904–January 23, 1989) to illustrate the Carroll classic for a small, exclusive edition of their book-of-the-month series. Dalí created twelve heliogravures — a frontispiece, which he signed in every copy from the edition, and one illustration for each chapter of the book."
Read more and see more of the wonderful illustrations at source here.
Reading two short extracts and doing a Q and A session with an audience at Fahrenheit 451, an independent bookshop in Barcelona.
Gary Gibson from Blanquerna Ramon Llull University kindly introduced me.
The Guardianrecently published an article by Sarah Watling with [arguably] lesser-known books about the Spanish Civil War that are available in English.
Literary Rambles blog recommends the ones by Rukeyser, Cercas, Laforet and Rodoreda.
Rightly describing George Orwell as "one of the great commentators of his own era." Personally, I'd go further and say of any era in the English language.
Orwell had an ability to get to the visceral in a way that few have. Shakespeare regularly did. James Baldwin also did.
"Lunja is brave. A warrior. Born in a small Catalan village, of Amazigh origin, an indigenous [group] of North Africa, from childhood she confronts racism, poverty,...sometimes even her own culture."
With this YA novel, the author puts mental health on the table and how it gets worse due to being an immigrants’ daughter and racialized as of African origin."
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Dec. 2022 under the title “Promenade of multitudes”]
A really good book is a universe away from its marketing.
One vibrant new piece of nonfiction, “Promenade of Desire, A Barcelona Memoir” is being promoted as “a sensual coming of age story: From Catholic virgin to Mata Hari as Spain moves from dictatorship to democracy.”
All true enough, but as well as getting a grip on the massive changes in Barcelona from the 1960s until just after the Olympic games in the early 1990s, the author Isidra Mencos charts a deeply internal arc.
Apart from the apparent honesty, what I like most about this raw account of an individualist’s first few three decades is the richness of self-discovery it contains.
The author’s sexual desire is undeniable but so is her lust for experience itself.
With an equally powerful bravery, she plunges into a subculture of horny squatters, for a while, finding herself most at home with the homeless.
We also witness other improvised or adapting versions of her: as an uncertain teenager and then young adult, still racked with a punishing guilt.
Born to an affluent, emotionally-cold lawyer family (from the city’s high up Sant Gervasi-Bonanova area) who slowly fell on hard economic times, Mencos tellingly relates how her closest childhood at home was with their housekeeper/childminder/cook.
Quica, a semi-literate Andalusian woman who’d lost a husband and ten of her fourteen children during their infancy, was an anchor for the inquisitive young girl even during night-time bad dreams.
Mencos’ pure affection for this kind of person (who makes it possible for the rich to live like the rich) is touching.
It’s a clear sign that she transcended at least a snobbery of neglect. The words, ”I bawled at her death as I had not done for my lost grandparents,” poignantly ends one section in the book.
Looking at wider themes, identity is a major one. The author puts herself in the category of a “good girl,” even a “girlie girl” with “a quiet demeanor that dissolved with the ice cubes at the bottom of [her] second drink. Out came a fearless woman who declared her literary opinions with confidence and subjugated a man with a swing of her hips.”
In fact, alcohol became a major problem for her and some of the men who were her live-in lovers. Violence and abuse followed.
The details are harrowing but also somehow instructive and a kind of balance comes in the shape of a new half-American half-Japanese female friend. “A role model for me because I still lived at half speed, with a split personality,” writes Mencos.
As Barcelona remodeled and replenished itself for the 1982 Olympics, the author herself was doing something similar as a part-time translator of articles for the official games committee. Then she set a routine for passing TOEFL and SAT exams so she could do a PhD in the USA.
Ultimately, she is healed: by herself, by quality therapies, probably too by discovering a genuine, transporting passion for the “unique vocabulary and no fears, no confusion” of salsa music and dance.
Here, we see a Barcelona that would’ve even been foreign to many locals, an immigrant/latin underworld of afflicted aficionados and slaves to a beat that was new to these European shores.
One of the great qualities in this book is that we also see a person who is now unafraid of so much she had been.
"Why doesn’t the 1978 Constitution of Spain include the word “landscape”?
Why doesn’t a Coastline Conservatory such as the French one exist in Spain?
Why were more than 1,000 beautiful villages catalogued in 1967 in Spain, and now there are barely 100 are left?
Why have democracy and the system of Autonomous Regions been seriously harmful to the landscape, and as a consequence, ruined in an irreparable manner the collective imagination?
España fea is a brillant study of the atrocities committed against the Spanish heritage from the end of the Franco dictatorship to today.
With rigour and sensitivity it gives a detailed overview of all the absurdities undertaken on the Mediterranean coasts [from] the North, passing through “emptied Spain” and Madrid’s urban-planning disaster, and it analyses the causes that led to this cultural catastrophe.
It reveals the strategy invented by ignorant and corrupt politicians and developers, with the complicit silence of a demobilized guild, that of architects, plus the indifference and ignorance of the intellectuals and the media.
Nevertheless, the book also analyzes in detail some examples of a work well done, connecting with the best European tradition, in cities such as Barcelona or Santiago de Compostela, or in villages such as Albarracín or Vejer de la Frontera.
Starting from numerous interviews and uniting the journalistic chronicle, travel book and political essay, Andrés Rubio presents a truly original text full of nuances. Analyzing also the cases of France, Germany and Italy, it carries a Europeanist and progressive message in defense of the best qualities of the public, advocating for land-use planning as an essential weapon to affirm democracy."
In a period of weeks where blind ignorance and Islamaphobia have been tragically demonstrated around the globe, it's apparent that the act of reading (and here I don't mean skimming racist Tweets) is more important than ever but some of the most powerful people are against it...
"The Trump statement [in the blogpost title] was used in an ad campaign ("World, stay awake") by the German bookstore chain "Thalia" to attract attention; according to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, it is true (cf. The Washington Post, Dec. 7, 2018).
The publisher Jordi Nadal used the same slogan for the title of an op-ed piece published in La Vanguardia newspaper in which he gave good reasons for reading, of which some excerpts read as follows:
[...] reading is growing, is feeding curiosity, is giving our minds and emotions more circuits and ressources. The biggest difference between the mind of a child educated in a rich family and that of poor one lies in the words he/she knows. A poor mind doesn't have words. A rich mind has got a universe of words that, in turn, combined and made their own, turn into the master key that will open a good part of the doors and situations present along life.
Juan José Millás reminded us that reality is made of words, which means who dominates words dominates reality. Thus, we consider it an absolute gift to have discovered books and reading. For very many reasons: we can read, because we want to feed our curiosity, because we want to grow, because we want to evade ourselves [?], because we want to understand other things and other people and cultures, because we want to listen to other lives.
[...] Without reading there is no depth of field, nor contrast, nor nuances. Without reading we easily fall into fanatism. You know, a fanatic is the one who doesn't want to change neither the topic nor the opinion. Fanatics read little or badly. Without reading, there triumph naturally the tweet and hate.
What is more, reading is healing and healthy. Reading --every day there are more scientific studies that avail it-- is good for your health. Readers on average live two years more.
Reading is a clean way of enjoying life. Enjoying it as a superior form of research to learn to govern a little better, with humility and gratitude, a life that's one's own in freedom. A PISA study revealed that, beyond the indicators of place, country, etc. and levels of reading competence, a home with less than 20 books is a reliable indicator of a more than nearly assured school failure, and, on the other hand, a home with more than 200 books is a near guarantee for academic success.
[...] Every reader has got the unique and non-transferable opportunity to be the master of a world when he/she dives into the intimacy of reading, and, as was said masterfully by the great author C.S. Lewis [at least in William Nicholson's Shadowlands]: "We read to know we are not alone."
Another statement [from] the Thalia campaign: "The world has got more secrets than those known by Siri."
SOURCE: La Vanguardia, Feb. 2, 2019, p. 26 [printed edition]; horizont.net [images]
"In Saint James' Park, London, the police apprehend a young man who is carrying a bag full of high explosives in one hand and a collection of letters sent to his grandfather by the writer Malcolm Lowry in his inside pocket.
In the course of the following interrogation, we discover the strange past and secret phobias of the detainee, and the emotional link between his actions and the Lowry letters. (The book's author really did have a grandfather to whom Lowry wrote on a regular basis)."
From the Back Cover:
Originally published in both Catalan and Spanish, 'If Only' now appears in a revised edition in English for the first time.
'This is a technically competent book with the force of a lashing gale. There is no question that it deserves an English language readership'. Times Literary Supplement.
'A work of literature which has received praise from many different sources, as well as the first Columna Award' El Punt newspaper.
'In short, a brilliant and innovative novel...you won't be able to put it down'. The poet Daniel Ruiz-Trillo in El Punt newspaper.
'This extraordinary novel, which I read in one sitting...interesting, caustic and technically remarkable.' El Periódico de Catalunya.
'One of the most surprising, unusual and ambitious books of recent years' El Temps magazine.
'Tree creates an atmosphere which convinces the reader and plunges him into the world of the story'. El País.
I'm happy to say I'll be doing a signing and sales session of Slow Travels in Unsung Spain with Barcelona's Come In bookshop's stand on the international day of books and Catalonia's St Jordi's Day, Saturday, April 23.
Time: 5pm-6pm
Place: Paseig de Gracia between C/-Provença and C/- Mallorca
