Pleased to see that the marvellous Baldus–a vague subterranean source of inspiration for the world’s wildest walking wisness–is getting a wider hairing. I’ve read chunks of the French translation and am looking forward to the English.
Carles Miró has conducted a lightning dawn raid on the correspondence between the publisher Joan Sales and his star author Mercè Rodoreda. Sales on Terenci Moix, a late 20th century chat show lit celeb: “Young Moix is a sadoleninist, one of those who consider that today simple homosexuality is nothing but a joke, that anything…
Check out this piece by Nicholas Mead on the thorough screwing the impoverished Carmel district of Barcelona is receiving from the socialist council in alliance with developers. It’s ironic that many of the same socialists jumped up and down with glee when local lad Juan Marsé won some writing prize or other. One can safely…
Baltasar Porcel is a Mallorcan writer who is said to believe that his Nobel is grossly overdue. I find his columns and novels unbearably egoistic and confused, and the excellent Carles Miró in a brief review of Porcel’s career and latest novel suggests that I am not alone.
Josep Pla, El quadern gris, November 6 1918: Coromina and my brother–a chemistry student–get entangled in an endless discussion about science. Coromina attacks–to my great surprise–my brother’s rooted conviction of the absolute priority of science in any system of human knowledge. Like all anti-rationalists, Coromina creates beautiful, brilliant phrases: he says, for example, that the…
Alexis de Vilar says the film copies his 1987 novel Goodbye, Barcelona. Manel Haro points out that the book was not, as Alexis claims, registered with the Ministry of Culture (to indicate publication) in 1987, but in October 2008, a month after the film was released here. Alexis claims inter alia to have survived an…
“Prime minister José Luis Zapatero said the assault on Andrew Sachs was ‘measured’ given the actor’s portrayal of a halfwit Spaniard who thinks a rat is some kind of Siberian hamster.” Given that Manuel in Fawlty Towers is Barcelona’s best-known literary figure, I’m surprised the council hasn’t declared war, or banned UK flights, or something.…
César-Javier Palacios reports on the cyclist, shot dead by a hunter who mistook him for a boar. When in death’s dark vale loud singing usually suffices to drive off hell’s hunters. Hunters know this too. In his romance, Count Arnaldos, hungry hawk in hand, falls prey to a sailor (love, glory or death, true or…
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