The Book of Barcelona edited by Manel Ollé and Zoë Turner
Review by Jess Moody
Translations by: Jennifer Arnold, Helena Buffery, Peter Bush, Ruth Clarke, Mara Faye Lethem, Annie McDermott, Laura McGloughlin, Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño.
‘No city would ever quite be a city if it was unable to imagine itself: if it didn’t accept and project a long flow of ever-changing fictions.’
How do you write Barcelona? Its millennia of history, its cultural landmarks, its struggles and triumphs through civil war, fascism, and movements for independence? In this new collection from Comma Press, the answer is mischievous and defiant: you write Barcelona as a blink. A glimpse. A flash on a monitor: is that a small child in danger? The faces and creaks of new neighbours: just enough to rouse curiosity, desire, jealousy. A window in the night, curtains open, a square of life on shameless display for all those who pass. An unseen theft. A causal cruelty. A rumour of a sighting: whales in the bay.
The ten short stories in this collection disrupt any coherent focus on place and identity, turning instead to lives both borderline and mundane, lived in small boxes of intimacy, whether through interactions (friendships, families, and couples) or location (apartments, laundromats, hotels, back gardens).
These peeks into contemporary lives reveal a weariness. These citizens have a love-hate unease with a city ‘that kept its back to the sea’. They wrangle with the limits of patience and tolerance: with the city, with ungrateful children, an unsatisfied marriage, or with the aches and pains of aging.
It is uncomfortable – sometimes dangerous – this getting on, and getting by. In ‘An Exemplary Life’ (Borja Bagunyà, trans. Jennifer Arnold) a boy keeps growing, his size threatening the very structure of his family apartment. The boy invokes fascination (without compassion) from the media (‘Martí was perfect for any kind of metaphor’) and ostracism from his neighbours. Any hope for a heroic or moral tale in this ancient city will be – quite literally – crushed by the end. In ‘Flags’ (Francesc Serés, trans. Helena Buffery), a supervisor searches for hours across the city’s port to ensure a child’s safety: a whole adventure battling with the frustrations of fences, zones, capitalism, and the trespass of marginalised communities. It’s unclear if victory in this quest is possible.
These stories sit together as a kind of communal grumble, but one that’s curious, tragic, and funny, and leaves a lasting anxiety for the city’s complexity. Translating a mix of both Spanish and Catalan prose into a shared English risks neutralising that complexity. But here the writers, translators and editors have successfully compiled a rich mix of voice and form to challenge and trip. We see it in Empar Moliner’s prose in ‘Ester (without an aitch)’ which unravels with its protagonist into a kind of drunken mania as the successful academic, wife and mother moves to bikini-clad sex work in the city red-light district over the space of an evening. Intoxication also fuels the fragmented second-personal rambling in ‘Or the worst, but only just’ (Carlos Zanón, trans Annie McDermott), the narrator weaving and staggering around childhood enemies, old haunts, and modern myths.
‘This universal language, English, Catalan, Spanish and drunk, all rolled into one, and we’re bounding from person to person like the ultimate trick shot, making sure we never pot the black.’
In the introduction, Manel Ollé writes of the need for a talking-back from these marginal spaces, against the dominant narratives moulded for tourists or academics alike. Against, in fact, any one definition of what Barcelona represents and to whom. The Book of Barcelona is a stylish slideshow of regrets, desires, and fleeting connections: blink and any certainty is gone.
The Book of Barcelona is published by Comma Press, 21st October 2021