Waiting for the Barbarian Coetzee

The firefighters of the Fahrenheit 451 brigade were suspicious. Our captain, whose name is Montag, Guy Montag, wasn't entirely sure either, although he tried to hide it. With the flamethrower over his shoulder, positioned at the corner of the Verge alley and the Sant Bernat passage, the chief was biting the nails of his left hand, asking himself, we suppose, the same question we were: could it be true? The rumor had spread with the cautious corner of the fog: the great South African author John Maxwell Coetzee was preparing, on Tuesday, to visit the Lata Peinada bookstore. It smelled like a lie; a big one. But a stenciled graffiti of the Nobel Prize winner's silhouette, plastered on the wall in front of the establishment run by Gustavo Caletti , fueled some hope.

There we were, then, waiting for the barbarian Coetzee, our watches ticking down, when the author of Disgrace appeared from the northern sector, flanked by his Spanish translator, Mariana Dimópulos , and the North American academic Valerie Miles . Good news! We had to pinch ourselves, as did some of the writers waiting for him ( Fresán , Néspolo , Carrión , García Lao ). As patient as he was stoic, Coetzee signed as many copies as his readers put in front of him, even though some of the most fanatical had brought the complete works (or almost) from home. The South African, now living in Australia, was honored by the gesture of dropping by a bookstore—Lata, to his friends—modest but with the ambitious mission of promoting Latin American literature in these parts.

Double visit of the South African Nobel Prize winner to the CCCB and the Lata Peinada bookstore, almost from abroad

The Nobel Prize winner and his companions then walked to the nearby Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, ​​where 450 eager souls were waiting in its auditorium. It was a packed house, with many notable figures in the front row (his Catalan translator, Dolors Udina ; Judit Carrera ; the Argentine poet María Negroni ; and the painter Frederic Amat ). Along with writers Dimópulos and Miles, the South African navigated the turbulent waters of language and translation, recounting, for example, the struggles of translating the word "brother" into Vietnamese. Which brother? The eldest? The youngest? The middle one? (The Asian language distinguishes between them.)

Later that same day, the brigade quickened their pace, from Raval to Eixample, thinking about The Pole (Ariadne's Thread), Coetzee's novel set in Barcelona and dedicated to Valerie Miles. Ah, cities and their layers of meaning and life superimposed, like in writing. That was more or less what the conversation Eduardo Mendoza was going to have at the Hotel Alma with the essayist, cultural journalist, and flâneuse Anna Maria Iglesia was about to discuss. Iglesia would have the good sense to spread out on the table an imaginary map of Barcelona, ​​from the 1888 Universal Exposition to our extraterrestrial days, like those of Gurb, following in the author's literary footsteps since The City of Marvels .

It's always a pleasure to listen to Mendoza. He confessed that writing a novel about his hometown wasn't a project planned from the beginning, but rather a kind of epiphany. Settled in New York in the early 1970s, while working on his first novel, The Truth About the Savolta Case , he realized how unknown the Barcelona fin-de-siècle and its hinge with the 20th century seemed. "If you scratched the surface, everyone had a gunfighter relative, on one side or the other."

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The talk was part of the "Literature and the City" series, sponsored by the Architecture and Society Foundation and directed by journalist and writer Manuel Hidalgo, which was held this week at Joaquín Ausejo 's hotel. Hopefully, the initiative will take hold. The sessions concluded on Thursday with a tour of ancient Mediterranean cities (Thessaloniki, Pella, Stagira, Taormina, Rome, Capri), led by María Belmonte , a traveler and reader who publishes her work in Acantilado, and cultural journalist Xavi Ayén . Another boss almost as patient and tireless as our Montag.