Barcelonas

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Andy Robinson (Translator)

Barcelona, the exuberant capital of Catalonia and host of the 1992 Olympics, is here explored and exposed by its greatest contemporary author.

Manuel Vazquez Montalban’s anecdotal history takes us on an imaginary tour of the city, from its most secret corners to its most famous monuments. An erudite and impassioned guide, Montalban finds a controversy in every building, a story in every street, illuminating the city’s rich history and turbulent politics, its art, gastronomy and football. There are many Barcelonas, and Montalban knows them the lavish art-nouveau houses in Vallvidrera where he himself lives; the labyrinthine squalor of the Barri Xino, setting for Genet’s Thief’s Journal ; the Barri Gotic where the independent Catalan Kingdom between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries created a nationalist consciousness which has endured for half a millennium; the oneiric Parc Guell, designed by the city’s most celebrated architect, Antoni Gaudi.

But this definitive survey is one unlikely to be endorsed by the Oficina de Turismo . For Montalban is fiercely critical of the values of the new ‘Olympic’ the misery of the inner-city slums where one person dies every second day from a heroin overdose; the speculation which has compounded overcrowding in a metropolis with the highest population density in Europe; the ravaging of working-class suburbs to make way for an aseptic international centre. Once Europe’s most utopian city, Barcelona, he argues, ‘has become a market, and everything is up for sale’.

For visitors, Barcelonas will prove a stimulating, indispensable companion. And for everyone interested in art and architecture, politics and sport, it will provide an enthralling introduction to the great European city.

Genres: Travel

218 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was a prolific Spanish writer: journalist, novelist, poet, essayist, anthologue, prologist, humourist, critic, as well as a gastronome and a FC Barcelona supporter.

He studied Philosophy at Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona and was also a member of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. For many years, he contributed columns and articles to the Madrid-based daily newspaper El País.

He died in Bangkok, Thailand, while returning to his home country from a speaking tour of Australia. His last book, La aznaridad, was published posthumously.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Montalbán is best known as a crime novelist (the brilliant Pepe Carvalho series) but here he turns his journaistic eye to his home town, Barcelona, and through a series of fine, gentle and moving narratives takes us into the lived, complex, contradictory cityscape that is the Catalan capital. His sensitivity to (and place in) the political left means that here we get a vversion of Barcelona that Robert Hughes can't get to in his Barcelona, the mundane, ordinary tales that we tell ourselves about the places we live, the struggles that form part of our collective popular memories, and bring our cities and homes to life. Montalbán's Barcelonas bubble with excitement, conflict, passion, and belief - but manage also to avoid the juvenile romanticism we so often see with these places of huge historical significance (and loss). Fabulous.

[Cristian Gustems · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Barcelones" ja s'ha convertit en un clàssic de la literatura barcelonina i sobre Barcelona. El text de Montalbán parteix del concepte de "crònica sentimental" per convertir-se en una narració sobre l'entitat "Barcelona" tal i com l'han viscut i construït les generacions de tots els barcelonins: ciutadans, inmigrants i visitants; escriptors tots d'un subtext i d'una forma d'entendre un lloc i uns moments compartits en la micro i macro-història. L'autor defineix una ciutat cronificada, on conviuen de forma arqueòlogica i simultània totes les barcelones que conformen la seva identat. No costa veure en l'autor un amor a la ciutat a mig camí entre la petitesa cultural, el desig d'agradar i el somni de la ciutat lliure. Barcelona com a misèria intel.lectual i utopia social on s'esdevé un gir final inesperat en la transformació olímpica. A mode de happy ending, l'autor observa amb ironia els desitjos de grandesa d'una ciutat que no pot ni vol oblidar la seva identitat, complexa i contradictòria. Un text meravellós per entendre uma mica més la raó d'ésser barcelonina.