Launch of my latest book (in Barcelona)

I'm happy to say I'll be launching my non-fiction book,

"Slow Travels in Unsung Spain" at this unique independent bookshop:
Fahrenheit 451

(C/- de la Ribera, 8, [El Born] BARCELONA 

[Metro: Barceloneta] 

Friday, 3Oth June, 7.00-8.00PM.

We'd love to see you there!

(Look inside the book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NJG91W7/ )

From "A Daily Dose of Muñoz Molina..."

"In the early seventies, when people of my generation were starting [senior high school], we were forced to choose between science and letters.

That poverty [of choice] forever impoverished our culture and therefore our understanding of reality.

In our ignorant adolescence the budding literates had infected us from indifference to the scientific sages practiced by the vast majority of the highlights of humankind.

In the letters was fantasy, imagination, sensitivity, the spirit of rebellion; in the sciences, the methodical, the rigid, the roman, the proseic of a reality that any slightly sensitive person would find less interesting than the elevated world of arts, books and the music.

Just as I miss the music education I did not have, I also regret that the low quality of scientific education I received and then the sharp and absurd separation between sciences and letters do not allow me now to understand more deeply a culture without which it is not possible to understand the reality of things nor adopt an attitude of rationality in life.

Separated from each other, the two cultures of C. P. Snow are lost to eachother in their own dead end alleys."

(A. Muñoz Molina, “The Imagination of the Real”, Mercury n. 133, September 2013)

"Why Read Homage to Catalonia By George Orwell? A Short Review"

 

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.

"The skin of a bull" by Salvador Espriu (my updated translation*)

Sometimes it is necessary, essential
that a man dies for a people
But an entire people must never die
for a single man:
Remember this, Sepharad.

Make sure to keep the bridges of dialogue safe
and try to understand and love
the different reasonings and tongues of all your children.
Drop by drop, let the rain fall on the seedlings
and the air cross the wide fields
like a generous extended hand.

May Sepharad live forever
through order and peace
In work and in hard-won
liberty.

"La pell de brau" by Salvador Espriu (1913 - 1985)

*Thanks to Antoni Cardona for co-translating.

In London: a highly-deserved tribute to Peter Bush

  

Not before time, one of the very finest translators of Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese and French is being honoured next week. (See above for details.)

His brilliant work on The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo is still one of the best pieces of translation I've ever read.

A genuine literary great and master of languages.

"The Empty Womb: the tale of a precarious and childless generation"

 "I often ask my friends how they see themselves ten years from now. We know what we will do next week, but not in three months. Will I have a job? Will I have a home? Will I have met somebody? 

The capacity to predict our own lives doesn’t exist, because the precariousness has dynamited the possibility of visualising our future. 

The dynamics have been configured to make everything last only a short time: buy that which you will eat for dinner tonight, we will see what it will be tomorrow; maybe in one month you won’t have a job; remember that next year your rental contract will end. 

The uncertainty generated by the crisis [of/since 2008] has not only rocked our expectations, but also our most primitive certainties; those that I thought would always exist even when I didn’t have anything material to hang on to: a child, for example. A panorama that doesn’t allow anything but short-term thinking, pure survival. A scenario in which to think about having children causes panic. But not having them, if you desire to, also causes panic. 

This book deals with putting off having children in the generation of the 25 to 35 year olds. Also about those who when they were about to have a child, they lost their jobs. It reflects on the fear of having children and on the fear of not ever having them. A collective tale that talks about how our bodies have been crossed by precariousness. And about putting it all off until we don’t know when."


Above is the publisher's summary of Noemí López Trujillo's, El vientre vacío. Relato de una generación precaria y sin hijos [The empty womb: the tale of a precarious and childless generation], 2019.

Source: an excellent blog on Spanish and Portugese literature: Literary Rambles.

"Catalan book week in Barcelona (Sept. 6 – 15)"

[(c) llull.cat]

"A week of literary events and book selling at the heart of Barcelona, next to its Cathedral (no, not La Sagrada Família…). 

The official website is Catalan only, but as you can see from the picture, there is also a stall dedicated to translations from Catalan. At the same time there is held a foreign-rights market with 18 publishers and agents from 16 different countries..."

SOURCE: Literary Rambles here [from Institut Ramon Llull (Catalan Language and Culture promotion)]

"Akala comes to Barcelona, Sept 8: Shakespeare or hip-hop?"

This Sunday in Barcelona hear from one of the most articulate voices in British hip-hop at Middle Passage Festival, as Akala kicks off a day of reflections on black culture.

For more details see Atlas of the Future here.

In France: "Literary Vending Machines Serve Up Short Stories"

IN GRENOBLE, FRANCE, the short story addict doesn’t have to go far to get their fix. 

Across the seven square miles of the central city, 14 orange-and-black machines* are dotted like Easter eggs in train stations, municipal buildings, and even the local museum. 

At the push of a button, each one will unspool a little piece of literature, printed on a long strip of paper, like a grocery store receipt. 

You can select for length—one, three, or five minutes—but precisely what you’ll be served up is in the hands of the gods. These are story dispensers, built by Grenoble-based publishing company Short Edition.

When the company began producing the machines in 2015, they were hardly set on global domination. But today, they are found around the world, with some 30 dispensers across the United States alone. (A map of the machines can be seen here.) 

In restaurants and hotels, libraries and government buildings, loiterers and literati alike can help themselves to these free stories, pulled from a digital bank of more than 100,000 original submissions.

The stories come from writing contests, with each entry carefully evaluated by Short Edition’s judges. At some point, they hope to translate them, and to “have some Asian authors read in Europe or America, American authors read in Africa or South America, etc.,” Loïc Giraut, an international business developer for the company, told LitHub. 

“We want to create a platform for independent artists, like the Sundance Institute,” Kristan Leroy, export director at Short Edition, said in an interview with the New York Times. “The idea is to make people happy. There is too much doom and gloom today.”

(* Dispensers cost $9,200, with an additional $190 monthly fee for content and software. COURTESY SHORT EDITION)

Read at source, Atlas Obscura.

"Literary rambles" through Iberian books

Literary rambles is a good quality English language blogsite that focuses on recent releases and news from the world of books across Spain and Portugal.

My review of "An Englishman in Madrid" by Eduardo Mendoza

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2015.]

"Look, I'll tell you how things really are," says one of the author's characters (speaking in 1936) "whatever they say, this is not a poor country. This is a country of poor people."

And it is the elements of social class, poverty and inherited wealth that I most enjoyed in this book, and not just those about Spain.

The Englishman of the title is Anthony Whitelands, a middle-class, Cambridge-educated art specialist who meets a seemingly generous and affable police officer on a train to the capital.

Before long though, we learn that he is being closely watched.

Whitelands has arrived in an atmosphere of public demonstrations, protest marches, strikes, beatings and sometimes fatal street violence between the forces of the right and the left.

The victims are largely the young and politically undeveloped but Whitelands is at first ignorant of all the friction and tension that was gripping so much of the country.

Increasingly, the protagonist is caught up in a number of situations outside his control and he is also snared by his own appetites: both carnal and his desire for greater recognition and fortune in "the narrow world of academia, with its tedious research and sordid rivalries."

He sees himself as just a small fish but is convinced that a newly discovered (privately-owned) Velazquez painting could be exactly what he his hoping for.

Whitelands goes on to find himself "in somewhat of a pickle," as his compatriots might say - everyone in the big, small town of Madrid wanting a piece of him for their own particular reasons.

He appears in many senses to be an "English gentlemen" but he eats like someone else. I find it hard to accept that he would sit down to a breakfast of "squid and beer."

Amongst other things, what really comes through in the pages of this jaunty, lively tale is Mendoza's sensitive and intuitive reading of art.

This book reads like a longish short story though it has a pace that is clearly Mediterranean. After ninety pages very little has happened.

It's a kind of slow burner with the characters regularly spouting extended "speechifying" monologues or digressing into unconnected anecdotes.

The reader gets a good feel for their personalities, facial expressions and other mannerisms and this all gives the narrative the feel of something written almost in the period in which it is said. That's not something easily achieved by a writer sitting at a computer in the 21st century.

The author is also astute enough to point out the existence of masons in Azaña's government of the time and, with an eye for detail, draws what he must think is a distinction between the British upper class with their apparent love of ceremony and the Spanish upper class who opt for simpler, less formal social situations and meals.

One of his more observant characters knows the necessity of explaining to the Englishman that "it's not just money that the proletariat wants. They want justice and respect."

In fact Mendoza drops comments on the hesitancy, contradictory decision-making and general malfunctioning of public administration that surely also apply to many companies and to the excesses of today.

"The Spaniard's keep wages low," says a English diplomat "while at the same time making social hierarchies plain. Workers earn half what they should and have to thank their employers...That way, their social position is reinforced."

On the other hand, one of the Spanish toffs makes the absurd statement that England has an "egalitarian society based on social relations that satisfy everyone," as if the trade union members and socialists in Britain did not exist.

Ultimately, the author entertains and occasionally informs while giving a relatively favourable portrait of the Spanish "nobility" of the day. He provides an explanation for their inaction on social progress that lies somewhere between a reason and a weak excuse.

Putting down Orwell

It's a genuinely encouraging development to see that with Hispabooks there is a new publisher for works from Spanish authors because the English-language world benefits from this.

I dislike the title of this article though. 

To put down Orwell is a mistake. Yes, his book "Homage to Catalonia" is now dated in a few small parts but it and his other writing, especially his non-fiction essays are still insightful and highly relevant. I do agree that it's absurd to build up a picture of Spain only from people like Hemingway.

Chris Finnegan mentions a number of books I'd like to read. He could just as easily have also mentioned two fine authors originally from Barcelona - Eduardo Mendoza and Juan Goytisolo, whose autobiography I finished reading recently and highly recommend on a number of levels.

Australian review of "Outlaws" by Cercas

In the Australian (mainstream) media this month was this review of Javier Cercas’ latest novel, Outlaws.


"Cercas captures Spain in transition from the tyranny of Franco to democracy, through an intense exploration of love and hate, loyalty and betrayal."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/javier-cercas-outlaws-captures-spain-in-transition-20140806-zv3qr.html#ixzz3Av3enI9U

Review of "Between Two Fires" by David Baird

This book is exactly the kind of thing you would hope to find when you are aimlessly looking through the shelves in that slowly dying place called a bookshop.


Focusing mainly on the area around his adopted home town of Frigiliana, David Baird has used immaculate research to write in compelling detail about the "people of the sierra" - those who took to the mountains, some to escape, some because they had little choice and some because they had strong political opinions that could then only be expressed in a way that led them to be tagged by Franco's cronies as "bandits."


Here, we find a Spain that is almost impossible to recognise in the modern version of this country. As Baird points out, at the start of the 20th century the average person there lived not much longer than 30 years. 

It was an almost feudal land where even subsistence farming was only for the lucky ones. There was no public hospitals or public transport and mules and donkeys were the only way of getting any distance without walking in bare feet or simple shoes. 

It was a time of smugglers, travelling repairmen, mass illiteracy and child labour (often starting at 6 years of age.) Progress took the form of a single 30 watt bulb being installed in a house. After Franco's victory this part of the country also became the land of night-time curfews where anyone found in the streets after dark was automatically arrested.


It is unsurprising then that there was a significant level of support for the men who fought against authority. While some townspeople were kidnapped for ransom by the rebels it was the civil guard who were more hated but both sides were feared, and for good reason. 

To help the guerrillas, such as providing them food or clothes, was enough to be thrown in prison but to not help them at times meant to the outlaws that you were collaborating with their enemy and could then be a target for recriminations. It is in this sense that ordinary people were caught "between two fires."


Apart from the clarity of Baird's writing and his even-handed approach (which is a relatively rare thing in the highly-politicised arena of Spanish history) half of the book is given over to those who were intimately involved in the events of the time to simply tell their own versions. Their first-hand accounts are vivid, illuminating and often poignant.


In short, this book plays a crucial part in making sure that this war is not a forgotten one, at least to English language readers. 


This review was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2014.

[...and also published at Good Reads and Amazon books.] 

Barcelona launch of my new non-fiction book, "The Remade Parent"

I invite you to come along and join us at the Aunzcat Soc space at C/- Pau Claris 106 Barcelona at 6pm on Friday, June 13, 2014.

We will be launching my new non-fiction book "The Remade Parent."

"BCNegra" - Crime fiction week in Barcelona

Personally, I think there is too much violence in modern fiction (and maybe it has always been this way) but I also realise that there is some quality writing to be found in books that use murder (as an easy way) to create suspense - Ian Rankin comes to mind.

From today, Barcelona is hosting "BCNegra" (Black Barcelona) or crime fiction week. According to the highly informative blog Literary Rambles: "This year’s star is Andrea Camilleri who will be awarded with the Pepe Carvalho prize. The program is in Catalan and [Castillian] Spanish, but as there are international authors coming, one will also hear some English."

"Goodreads" is a good read

I have just joined the book review site Goodreads and I am finding it to be a really worthwhile place to visit.

As well as giving independent authors an opportunity to publicise their work, it allows readers to express opinions on the books they've read and to get involved in conversations with other readers and also some writers.

I should have started visiting it a long time ago.

My interview with Matthew Tree - author of SNUG

Below is the text of my interview with Matthew Tree, the prolific British/Catalan writer who has just published SNUG, his first novel in English.

[A version of his article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine in June 2013.]

You've had a very successful career over many years writing in Catalan but this is your first published novel in English. What has caused the delay and now the publication of SNUG?

What mainly caused the delay was the fact that I found my written voice first in Catalan, in 1990, when I wrote and published a small text called 'Viatge a Romania'. As I still hadn't found my written voice in English, I then made a more or less conscious decision to write only in Catalan for about ten years (with the odd incursion into English, which only went to prove that I still couldn't write in this language). Then, in 2000, I got an idea for a full-length novel which came to me in English and in English only. So I wrote the novel in English, and discovered that, finally, after the years of discipline of working in another language, I had finally broken the back of my mother tongue. That novel, however, was published in Catalan (my version) and in Spanish (translated by someone else from the English original). But not in English. The idea for SNUG came to me in 2006 and was based on a host of other ideas that had been building up over the years. I finished it in 2011. My agent, irritated with the wall of silence she was getting from most UK publishers, decided to bring SNUG out as a promotional, though professionally produced, edition. Much as I like this edition, which has been beautifully done, the idea is to use it to attract the attention of a mainstream publisher.

You are one of the few writers born in England who is brave enough to regularly write honestly about social class in that country. How important is class as a theme in your work?

Class was the reason it took me so long to find my written voice in English. Class is built in to British English, as far as I can see. The stratification that English society is still in the grip of, reaches right into the language: open a book by almost any English writer and the vocabulary and syntax will immediately indicate the social class of either the writer or the narrating voice. I wanted an English that was fully malleable, fluid, unconditioned, like American English. And when I got it - or I hope I did! - I used it to talk about class, but directly, not 'unconsciously'. They say writers should write about what they know. Like everybody raised in England, I know about class. It's affected me all my life, and I suspect it's a lot more important - reveals a lot more about the nature of people in general - than is usually supposed.

Why did you set SNUG in a small town on an island in England?

Because I wanted the African visitors in the book to come across England at its most complacent and cosy and snug. I got the idea for the novel when on holiday in the Isle of Wight, which is the kind of place that feels like nothing is ever, ever going to happen there. Perfect.

One of the three main characters in SNUG is what could be called an "intelligent racist." He's a quick-witted man but his blind-spot is that he is instinctively prejudiced. Did you base his personality on a particular "type" of person?

The interesting thing about racism is that, despite its irrational, acientific (or pseudoscientific) nature, it is often espoused by highly intelligent and well-informed people. Who are not intelligent enough, however, to realise that they are gift-wrapping their intelligence around outmoded and patently absurd prejudices in order to justify them. Dr Whitebone in SNUG is that kind of 'intelligent' racist. Smart, but not really smart. Christ knows there's enough of them around.

This same character in the novel says that "providence has provided me" as the solution to the crisis in the town. Do you think that this delusion is a typical one of religious zealots?

No. For what it's worth, I suspect that religious zealots are weak-minded people who love to feel that they are subjected or even enslaved by their beliefs and therefore do not have to answer for anything those beliefs impel them to do. Dr Whitebone's sense of providence is more like that believed in by many political leaders, of the left or right: they think they're the man or woman of the moment, and can help the benighted populace, even if this means some sacrifices being made by that same populace. 

The anti-Semitism in your novel is particularly well shown-up. How much of a problem do you think this still is, in the UK and Europe?

You'd have thought that after the Shoah, anti-Semitism would have gone the way of the dodo bird, but certain far left European intellectuals, especially in France, revived it in a new form in the late 60s and early 70s - as 'anti-Zionism' - and it has since spread from there. In the Arab world, where it was imported directly from Nazi Germany through Haj Amin al-Husseini (the founder of modern Palestinian nationalism, and one of Yasser Arafat's mentors) it is especially virulent. But it should maybe be remembered that Zionism - not to be confused with religious Zionism - is simply the belief that the Israeli state has a right to exist. Anti-Zionists, then, presumably want it to be eliminated (Hamas are genuinely anti-Zionist in this sense). It's a complicated issue, as there is no question that the Israeli state deserves severe criticism for its continued occupation of Palestine (the parts of Palestine that used to belong to Jordan, to be precise). But many people use that as a starting point for encouraging anti-Jewish hatred around the world, which is just absurd. As we hold this interview, news has come through that the Syrian government has just killed 50 Turkish people in a bomb attack. Compare the fairly muted international outcry now with when the Israeli military killed nine Turkish nationals on a boat headed for Gaza, a few years ago. Why this difference in virulence? Anti-Semitism, unfortunately, is still very much with us, on both the left and right, but gives itself sneaky political justification in the form of the undeniably legitimate Palestinian struggle for independence (support for this struggle, of course, doesn't automatically imply an anti-Semitic stance: you have to read between the lines to see where people are really coming from, in this sense). In the West, it seems, then, that anti-Semitism is hard-wired into the belief system, perhaps because it was, indeed, a Christian invention.

Another of the three main characters is 12 years old. What did you do to create the mind of this character?

I thought about when I was twelve. A lot of the larking about between the narrator and the other young teenagers is based on a holiday I went on in East Anglia - when I was twelve.

The other narrator of the story is an African man who is directly involved in creating the conflict on the island. At one point he uses a popular British hymn to cleverly satirise the locals. What was your idea behind this?

In fact, the use of William Blake's 'Jerusalem' - which Jonas Cole, the African spy, overhears and 'adapts' as he listens to it - is a bit of a cliché, in that it's appeared in a couple of films I can't identify at the moment (I vaguely remember people singing the hymn in church, cut with images of other people being beaten up by British soldiers or police). But 'Jerusalem' does sum up perfectly a kind of exalted self-satisfaction you often find in England, and which the visiting Africans, of course, disturb somewhat.

What influenced you to write SNUG and have you read any other books that also skillfully explore colonialism?

For about 20 years I'd worked on different ideas for a novel based on a siege: but I never got either the besiegers or the besieged 'right': the situations i invented just didn't work at all. Then there I was, in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, when I suddenly remembered a story I wrote when I was 20, in which thousands of Africans come to Thatcher's England, furious with the way their continent is being treated and the bullshit they have to put with. Bingo: I realised a Wight coastal village would be the besieged entity, and the besiegers, Africans. As for reading, I read anything I could get my hands on about Africa: history, African fiction, including Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart', perhaps the greatest anti-colonial novel of them all. For SNUG, I went to Tanzania and was lucky enough to meet a major Swahili language writer, Erick Shigongo, who put things into a much-needed non-European perspective.

What are you working on currently as your next book for publication?

I'm working on a new novel in English, which could be summarised in three words: 'England as sect'.

What are your thoughts about the current political situation in Catalonia?

My personal sense is that we are at a historical moment that started on the 11th of September, 2012. The outcome is uncertain but whatever happens, it will mean that Spain will no longer be as most people seem to think it is. It seems that the home-rule process is accelerating, not least because the Spanish government  is doing it's best to make Catalans feel like aliens inside Spain.

Antonio Muñoz Molina becomes first Spaniard to win literature prize for 15 years

He is a writer I have championed ever since I first read his work some years ago.

"Novelist and essayist Antonio Muñoz Molina on Wednesday became the first Spaniard in 15 years to be awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters.


The jury decided to honor the 57-year-old author, who was chosen over names such as Irish writer John Banville and Japan's Haruki Murakami, for "a body of work that admirably assumes the condition of the intellectual committed to his time."

For the last few days, the jury had been considering the need to hand the award to a Spaniard. The last Spanish national to win the Letters prize was Francisco Ayala in 1998 and no Spanish-speaking author has received the honor since Guatemala's Augusto Monterroso won 13 years ago.

"When one receives a prize, one feels very happy and when one doesn't, one doesn't," Muñoz Molina told a press conference in Madrid on Wednesday. "But I don't think that the career of a writer can be measured by the prizes they receive. One can be very good and not win prizes and one can be bad and win them."

Article and photo source here at El Pais.

My book, "The Re-Made Parent," to be published via a Barcelona agency

 

My non-fiction book, "The Re-Made Parent" is to be published via the Antonia Kerrigan Literary Agency in Barcelona (AK Digital, Amazon (and others) plus print-on-demand.) 

(Thanks to Matthew Tree and all those involved in the long struggle to get to this point, finally.)