Barcelona: a Literary City
StefaniaHello everybody!!
How are you all doing??
Today is a very nice day here in Barcelona! I’m also very happy because I am going to Italy for some days to visit my family and friends there!!! But even if I will be on holidays, I would first like to give you some tips for these days…
Today I’m going to talk to you about three novels, which action is set here in Barcelona, had a huge success internationally and I highly recommend to everybody!
As you probably know, I really love books and I hope one day I could have my own publishing house!
These 3 books I am going to talk to you about are not part of my academic studies, as I read them during my free time, but I definetly loved them! The books are:
“La Sombra del Viento” (”The shadow of the wind”) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón; “Nada” (”Nothing”) by Carmen Laforet and “La Catedral del Mar” ( “The Cathedral of the sea”) by Ildefons Falcones.
All these 3 writers are from Barcelona and they give very accurate descriptions of the city in 3 different historical periods.
“La sombra del viento” is set in the Barcelona of the 20th Century, between the decline of the splendours of modernism and traces of the Spanish Civil War.
It deals with the story of a young guy, called Daniel Sampere, whose father leads him to a very dark place in the heart of the Old City. This place is the “Cementery of the Forgotten Books”, located in Calle Santa Ana, in the Gothic District.
Here he finds a book, “La sombra del Viento”, written by a bohemian writer called Julian Carrax, who moved to Paris during the Civil War.
Anotther important character of the novel is Gustavo Barceló, who seems to be very interested in Daniel’s book and who usually frequents “El Quatre Gats” café, located in ‘Calle Montsió’ 3, also in the Gothic District, a kind of “tertulia” (bar, club) where the most famous atrists of the time, like Picasso, Federico García Lorca or Salvador Dalí, used to meet.
Another literary description of Barcelona is the one that Carmen Laforet gives us in her autobiographical novel, entitled “Nada”.
The novel deals with the story of a young girl, Andrea, who comes to Barcelona in order to attend the University here.
The story let us discover a grey and gloomy Barcelona, after the destruction of the Civil War, that is also an introspection of the protagonist’s inner life, full of desperation because her family died during the Civil War, and loss of expectations.
Finally, the last novel is “La Catedral del Mar“, written by Ildefons Falcones.
In this case, the story takes place in the Middle Age, during the biggest period of prosperity of the city. In particular, the life of the protaginist, Arnau Estanyol, a slave who moved to Barcelona to become a ‘free person’, and the construction of the cathedral of ‘Santa María del Mar’.
The literary itinerary develops between the old district of Ribera (fishermen’s neighborhood), where the Cathedral still stands, the “Consulado del Mar” (the Maritime Consulate), Plaza del Palau, in the Gothic District, and the Calle Montcada, in the Borne, where now stands the Picasso Museum.
I hope you enjoy the reading as much as I did and that you have the opportunity to come here to Barcelona to discover all these fascinating places!!! You would be amazed of the number of people you see around the ‘Catedral del mar’ commenting about how it was described in the book!
Stef
