Sense of the City: Barcelona

A BBC series is asking novelists who have a profound understanding of the city they live in to reflect on the fiction it has produced and the various works of literature set there.

One of the tendencies is to avoid a kind of picturesque or anthropological view of the city Matthew Tree

Matthew Tree was born in London but has lived in Barcelona since 1984 and writes in both English and Catalan, the regional language of north-eastern Spain. He satirised both Catalans and foreigners living in the region in the radio programme Guiri-Guiri and later on television in La Cosa Nostra. His 1999 short story collection Ella ve quan vol won the Andromina Award.

The literature about Barcelona depends very, very much on who the writer is.

For example if you take a pre-war writer who was writing about the late '20s and early '30s in Barcelona, like Joseph Maria de Sagarra - who wrote a brilliant expose of the bourgeoisie in Barcelona called Private Life - then you get a really gritty look at what you would call the underground life of Barcelona, the live sex shows as they existed in the 1920s.

There are some amazing descriptions of those. And that same theme is picked up a little bit 50 years later by Eduardo Mendoza in a book called City of Marvels in which he took the late 19th Century in Barcelona and imagined a Catalan farm boy going into the city and rising to fame and fortune through completely illegal means.

So there is a kind of overlap there between those two books in that both look at the Barcelona underworld.

There are three major events which have attracted authors to write about the city or have helped authors to get ideas.

There are the two international expos which took place in 1888 and 1929 around which there was an enormous amount of activity, and that obviously makes a perfect setting for a novel.

And then of course there is the whole period of the civil war and the post-war.

I think cities definitely are alluring to novelists simply because you find everything and everybody in a city at any given time

For example one of the most famous Catalan woman writers, Merce Rodoreda, has written an extraordinary book, The Time of the Doves, about a young woman getting married in the Barcelona of the civil war.

And more recently there is a huge best-seller out at the moment called La sombra del viento - The Shadow of the Wind - by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which is a novel set in the post-war period of Barcelona, where everything is gloomy, no-one's got any money, it's foggy and rainy all the time and so on.

I think cities definitely are alluring to novelists simply because you find everything and everybody in a city at any given time.

You can go from a working-class area to a bourgeois area. You can meet characters from all over the place.

People tend to come into cities not only from other parts of the country the city happens to be in, but from all over the world.

So it's a place where things are naturally going on.

You're walking along a deserted street and suddenly a whole platoon of cavalry wearing feathered hats starts riding down the road towards you - no explanation for it

It's difficult to say what makes Barcelona so special for literature, but I would quote something that a comic artist said years and years ago in a little magazine, where he said: "Barcelona is a magical city on a popular level".

And what he meant by that is that just walking along the street you find yourself constantly surprised by scenes and events which would otherwise be considered completely surreal.

For example, you're walking along a deserted street and suddenly a whole platoon of cavalry wearing feathered hats starts riding down the road towards you.

No explanation for it - no reason for it whatsoever. It just happened to be there. And the whole city is a bit like that.

You constantly keep running up against things like that.

In Barcelona many of the artists and writers and architects all knew each other and all went out together and all did things together.

So for example there was a surrealist philosopher called Francesc Pujols, who was a personal friend of Antonio Gaudi and a personal friend of Salvador Dali, and had a major influence on both those people as they did on him.

So you've got this idea of a very close-knit, cultural set of artists and architects, and musicians, photographers, writers, all forming quite a close-knit group of friends.

As regards new writing about Barcelona I think one of the tendencies is to avoid a kind of picturesque or anthropological view of the city, which is what has happened a little bit in books which have concentrated as Barcelona as a setting.

The latest work of fiction by Quim Monzo for example.

Quim Monzo is the best-selling author in the Catalan language.

And his latest book called The Best of Worlds is set in Barcelona, but in a way he merely uses Barcelona as a kind of back drop for the black humour which has made him famous.

So these stories are all about people with cancer, or people who decided to take their dead son to the taxidermist, or whatever.

And then suddenly he'll point out that the taxidermist just happened to be in the Plaza Real of Barcelona, so suddenly everyone gets a visual image of what the setting is like.

And I think that might be a tendency - to get away from the picturesque and to use Barcelona more as a natural setting.

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Sense of the City can be heard on the BBC World Service programme The World Today until Friday 8 August, and includes Orhan Pamuk talking about Istanbul, Romesh Gunesekera on Colombo, and Zadie Smith looking at London.