"To the bells, love. To the bell towers of joy, entertainer. Yes, I would climb. But you will not climb. Not to the bell towers of joy.
"Heaven, as that of Easter, a gate. His body full of blue blows. And on the chest, with the movement of birds. The white moon, now dead. With a strike of the lance, Blai. That never heals.
"To the bells, love. To the bell towers of joy, entertainer. Yes, I would climb. But you will not climb. Not to the bell towers of joy.
"To the coral of gardens. Love open from pomegranates. How close to the distant bells. In the dawn of jasmine. Doves on the sea. To the sticks, pineapples of paschal candles."
These peculiar verses (even allowing for my less than perfect translation) come from "Pasqua Nova"; New Easter, if you like. It is one of four poems of Easter that were published in 1950, the first works to go into print by a poet and writer with whom you are probably unfamiliar but who is considered to be one of the greats of Mallorcan and Catalan literature. His name is Blai Bonet.
In Santanyi's Casa de Cultura, there is a centre devoted to the contemporary poetry of this son of Santanyi. He was born ninety years ago into what was a family of modest means. At a time when education in Mallorca was limited to say the least, he was, by the age of fifteen, conversant with the works of Virgil, Ovid, Plato and Aristotle. He owed it all to the seminary in Palma that he entered at the age of ten and so quite possibly also to the Marquis Barberà, the owner of the finca where his father worked.
He was to turn his back on the priesthood, suffering in different ways: mentally and physically. He was to live with a lung condition, the result of tuberculosis, while something of an existential crisis when he was still young - only 21 - caused confused attitudes to religion and led him to embark on a career as a writer.
"The Four Poems Of Easter", one of the works he was to write while in a sanatorium for his TB, reflects some of Bonet's struggles. In "Pasqua Nova" he talks to himself, blending curious natural imagery with allusions to Christ on the cross. His references to nature, commentators suggest, were mostly drawn from Santanyi, and not least from the coast and the sea: one of his greatest works, started while he was in the sanatorium, was "El Mar". Fifty years after he had embarked on the writing of this novel, it was made into a film. Agusti Villaronga, the Mallorcan director, described it variously as sordid, illuminating, beautiful, haunting, poetic and full of love for its characters. He also spoke, and Bonet had now been dead for three years (he died in Santanyi), about the attitude to religion, to the riddle of existence and to struggles in confronting death. In essence, and Villaronga could have been talking about "The Four Poems Of Easter" as well, Bonet was constantly fearful of his mortality, the consequence of his illness. He lived his life expecting to die.
Though celebrated among the ranks of the Catalan literati and though also enjoying a good career, his condition was such that his doctors advised him to settle again in Santanyi (he had been, among other places, in Barcelona and Germany). The climate, it was felt, would be best for him. This was in 1972, and he went into what was a semi-retirement. His work and he himself began to be forgotten, but he was to return in 1987 with a book of poems called "The Young". He received numerous awards, including the Balearic Ramon Llull prize (posthumously in 1998).
The rediscovery of Bonet was to lead critics to place him on a high pedestal indeed. One has compared him with James Joyce in that stylistically he was an innovator in avant-garde literature. There is also the story of how the musician Lou Reed attended an event devoted to Catalan poets that was led by other musicians, Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson, and chose one of these poems to recite himself. Its title is "All Brow" from a collection by Bonet called "Nova York". All Brow was in fact a Panamanian boxer Al Brown, the first Latin American boxer to become a world champion.
Bonet is one of the writers celebrated in the Walking on Words project that has seven routes that combine walking with the life, the times and the works of major names in Mallorca's literature. And in the south-east corner of the island, Santanyi is a town that can boast its own strong literary, cultural and artistic tradition. It was here, on the coast, where Josep Costa Ferrer (Don Pep), painter, caricaturist and writer, was to create Cala d'Or, originally a haven for artists and writers. And it was here where Blai Bonet saw the sea: El Mar.
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Monday, March 28, 2016
Monday, January 11, 2016
The Great Unknown: Llorenç Moya
Freddie Frinton, some of you may be aware, is big news in Germany on New Year's Eve. The 1963 recording of "Dinner For One" in which he plays the manservant James to May Warden's Miss Sophie is broadcast every New Year's Eve and has not missed a year since 1972. It spawned a catchphrase that is familiar to most Germans: "The same procedure as every year."
In Mallorca, there is something not totally dissimilar. The procedure is not entirely the same every year, the performance is not a television theatrical production and it it is staged on 6 January rather than New Year's Eve, but it has nonetheless acquired the status of an annual tradition every bit as strong as "Dinner For One". It is called "L'Adoració dels Tres Reis d'Orient" (the adoration of the Three Kings) and it has now been presented since 1985.
The author of this was the Binissalem-born writer, Llorenç Moya. This year is to be his year. He was born one hundred years ago. His name, for those of you who are regular readers of this column, may be familiar, but probably for a reason other than his literary achievements. Moya was crucial to the founding of what became the late September Vermar grape harvest wine fair and fiesta in his home town. Above all, though, he was one of the towering names of Mallorca's literature of the twentieth century.
The performance on 6 January takes place in the open air in Ses Voltes park in Palma, its first ever performance having been in the town hall square thirty-one years ago. The theatre company which stages it is called Taula Rodona, but its actors are certainly not just professionals. This year's interpretation, in which the Three Kings were in fact queens, featured the president of the Balearic parliament, Xelo Huertas, as Balthazar. (Her portrayal was panned by the critics.)
Essentially, Moya's work is a farce that combines satire and is thus littered with current-day references to political matters: the recent national election offered fertile sources for the satire. But it isn't the only annual production for which he was originally responsible. The same Taula Rodona has been following much the same procedure as every year on Good Friday, also since 1985. Moya's "Via Crucis" is an altogether more serious performance that depicts the crucifixion and resurrection and does so on the steps of the Cathedral. Emotional and somewhat surreal, it is something which, like the 6 January production, is known about but which attracts, or seems to, comparatively little promotional attention.
Yet, here are two tributes that are played out each year to this great of the island's literary traditions, one who, it's probably fair to say, will be unknown to the vast majority of Mallorca's visitors and to a sizable number of the island's residents as well.
Miquel Àngel Vidal is a writer who, in 2012, presented a doctoral thesis directed by a professor at the University of the Balearic Islands into the life and works of Moya. It is vast, over one thousand pages of description, analysis, reproductions of his texts and of original manuscripts plus a set of photos that detailed Moya's life. If for these photos alone, where a non-academic or non-Catalan speaker is concerned, it is an utterly extraordinary document, as they show Moya and his family from the time soon after his birth through to his later life, often shown with other leading figures from Mallorca's literary past, such as Llorenç Villalonga and Llorenç Riber. They also show of course the passing of time, via the Franco years and to just before he died in 1981.
As such of course, hardly anyone will see it. Which is a great shame. It can't be expected for those who don't speak Catalan or even some who do to get overly interested in his works, but there is much to be said for revealing to a wider audience the life and times and so the changes in Mallorca and its society through what he had to say and also the photographic evidence. But Moya, as with other Mallorcan writers, is a mystery because there is no attempt to make him less so. In his case, though, he was more of a mystery even to the aficionado, and one of these was Miquel Àngel Vidal. When Moya died, he was nineteen, but the writer was a "great unknown". It seems that he was a humble man who didn't indulge in self-promotion. It was said that he had no literary rivals, although Riber was said to have despised him. Why? Well, it may have been due to his physical being: short, unattractive. It was also rumoured that he was gay.
However much he might have been a great unknown, he no longer is. Two of his works are subject to the same or similar procedure every year. And this year is his year.
In Mallorca, there is something not totally dissimilar. The procedure is not entirely the same every year, the performance is not a television theatrical production and it it is staged on 6 January rather than New Year's Eve, but it has nonetheless acquired the status of an annual tradition every bit as strong as "Dinner For One". It is called "L'Adoració dels Tres Reis d'Orient" (the adoration of the Three Kings) and it has now been presented since 1985.
The author of this was the Binissalem-born writer, Llorenç Moya. This year is to be his year. He was born one hundred years ago. His name, for those of you who are regular readers of this column, may be familiar, but probably for a reason other than his literary achievements. Moya was crucial to the founding of what became the late September Vermar grape harvest wine fair and fiesta in his home town. Above all, though, he was one of the towering names of Mallorca's literature of the twentieth century.
The performance on 6 January takes place in the open air in Ses Voltes park in Palma, its first ever performance having been in the town hall square thirty-one years ago. The theatre company which stages it is called Taula Rodona, but its actors are certainly not just professionals. This year's interpretation, in which the Three Kings were in fact queens, featured the president of the Balearic parliament, Xelo Huertas, as Balthazar. (Her portrayal was panned by the critics.)
Essentially, Moya's work is a farce that combines satire and is thus littered with current-day references to political matters: the recent national election offered fertile sources for the satire. But it isn't the only annual production for which he was originally responsible. The same Taula Rodona has been following much the same procedure as every year on Good Friday, also since 1985. Moya's "Via Crucis" is an altogether more serious performance that depicts the crucifixion and resurrection and does so on the steps of the Cathedral. Emotional and somewhat surreal, it is something which, like the 6 January production, is known about but which attracts, or seems to, comparatively little promotional attention.
Yet, here are two tributes that are played out each year to this great of the island's literary traditions, one who, it's probably fair to say, will be unknown to the vast majority of Mallorca's visitors and to a sizable number of the island's residents as well.
Miquel Àngel Vidal is a writer who, in 2012, presented a doctoral thesis directed by a professor at the University of the Balearic Islands into the life and works of Moya. It is vast, over one thousand pages of description, analysis, reproductions of his texts and of original manuscripts plus a set of photos that detailed Moya's life. If for these photos alone, where a non-academic or non-Catalan speaker is concerned, it is an utterly extraordinary document, as they show Moya and his family from the time soon after his birth through to his later life, often shown with other leading figures from Mallorca's literary past, such as Llorenç Villalonga and Llorenç Riber. They also show of course the passing of time, via the Franco years and to just before he died in 1981.
As such of course, hardly anyone will see it. Which is a great shame. It can't be expected for those who don't speak Catalan or even some who do to get overly interested in his works, but there is much to be said for revealing to a wider audience the life and times and so the changes in Mallorca and its society through what he had to say and also the photographic evidence. But Moya, as with other Mallorcan writers, is a mystery because there is no attempt to make him less so. In his case, though, he was more of a mystery even to the aficionado, and one of these was Miquel Àngel Vidal. When Moya died, he was nineteen, but the writer was a "great unknown". It seems that he was a humble man who didn't indulge in self-promotion. It was said that he had no literary rivals, although Riber was said to have despised him. Why? Well, it may have been due to his physical being: short, unattractive. It was also rumoured that he was gay.
However much he might have been a great unknown, he no longer is. Two of his works are subject to the same or similar procedure every year. And this year is his year.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
They've Mapped The Imagination
A few years ago I wrote an article about maps, Mallorca's maps. It was about a function of maps that went beyond the obvious. It said: "Maps should map the imagination. A map of Mallorca should be a map of Mallorca's imagination". It was an article that visited a theme I have touched on periodically: the power of stories, those that have been written and spoken and those which are untold.
Behind the facts of Mallorca's history - the battles, the feuds, the buildings, the plagues - there are the stories. It is these which give history greater meaning. They are variously social commentary and observation or fantasy, but even the fantasy is rooted in certain realities, those of oral tradition, the passing of the fantastic tale from generation to generation, itself a product of myth, superstition, the land or sea.
Mapping imagination is all this. Stories told and stories untold. The fantastic or the factual, and those which combine both. And within Mallorca there is a denseness of stories, the consequence of its smallness, of its remoteness and insularity, of its fears and anxieties and of its essential folkloric tradition - when you are cut off and separated as Mallorca was, the stories acquire a uniqueness and difference.
The literary and story-telling tradition is centuries old. Its first true manifestation dates from the later thirteenth century. Ramon Llull's "Blanquerna" was a semi-autobiograhical novel of fact and fiction, the hero - Blanquerna - leaving the family home to devote himself to God, to aspire to become pope, to become a hermit in order to dedicate himself completely to God.
Llull was one of those who was name-checked at the launch of Walking on Words last weekend. This initiative combines walking routes (which might equally be cycling or driving routes) with the literary heritage of Mallorca in its different guises - the observational documentary, the novel, the poetic, the folkloric and the fantasy. Across the island there are main centres: Ca N'Alluny, Robert Graves' house in Deya; Casa Llorenç Villalonga in Binissalem; Can Llobera in Pollensa; the Institució Alcover in Manacor, among others.
Between them, these four centres capture these different elements of the island's literary tradition. Graves, the poet, the novelist, weaving an alien's perspective into a Mallorcan framework; Villalonga, the author of the modern tradition with his at times scathing insights into the presence of the early tourists (well before the boom); Miquel Costa i Llobera, fundamental to the new school of Mallorcan poetry and literature; Antoni Maria Alcover, the keeper of the oral tradition, the promoter of the fantastic and the folkloric - Mallorca's "rondalles", the island's fairy and other folk tales.
But of these, there is an intermingling of elements. Costa i Llobera's "El Pi de Formentor", perhaps the best known of all Mallorca's poems, was one of the purest expressions of the Mallorcan imagination, borrowing from a folk tradition inspired by the landscape. Graves drew on this landscape, one that had enchanted and captivated him. For Villalonga, there was the shifting nature of society and how it determined the landscape, and he was one who was as willing to highlight local pretensions - those of Mallorca's nobility - as he was those of the incomers.
These are, though, but a select few of the writers that the walks embrace. There are all the others, the familiar and less familiar: the Archduke Louis Salvador, Agatha Christie, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Alcover, Rafel Ginard. And there is also Jules Verne, whose place in Mallorca's literary and touristic past is often overlooked. When a nascent tourism industry was founded in the early twentieth century, it was to France that Mallorca looked as much as it ever did to Britain. This was to be tourism akin to the French Riviera, a winter tourism of mild weather before the Americans, French and Germans invented the suntan and so the whole notion of the summer vacation. And with winter in mind, there is also George Sand and her variously complimentary and condemnatory observations of Valldemossa and Mallorca.
I am intrigued by Walking on Words. Intrigued but also pleased. At the launch presentation, they handed out a map. A map of Mallorca with the routes and the authors. A map of Mallorca's imagination. I salute them.
For more information, go to the website: www.walkingonwords.com.
Behind the facts of Mallorca's history - the battles, the feuds, the buildings, the plagues - there are the stories. It is these which give history greater meaning. They are variously social commentary and observation or fantasy, but even the fantasy is rooted in certain realities, those of oral tradition, the passing of the fantastic tale from generation to generation, itself a product of myth, superstition, the land or sea.
Mapping imagination is all this. Stories told and stories untold. The fantastic or the factual, and those which combine both. And within Mallorca there is a denseness of stories, the consequence of its smallness, of its remoteness and insularity, of its fears and anxieties and of its essential folkloric tradition - when you are cut off and separated as Mallorca was, the stories acquire a uniqueness and difference.
The literary and story-telling tradition is centuries old. Its first true manifestation dates from the later thirteenth century. Ramon Llull's "Blanquerna" was a semi-autobiograhical novel of fact and fiction, the hero - Blanquerna - leaving the family home to devote himself to God, to aspire to become pope, to become a hermit in order to dedicate himself completely to God.
Llull was one of those who was name-checked at the launch of Walking on Words last weekend. This initiative combines walking routes (which might equally be cycling or driving routes) with the literary heritage of Mallorca in its different guises - the observational documentary, the novel, the poetic, the folkloric and the fantasy. Across the island there are main centres: Ca N'Alluny, Robert Graves' house in Deya; Casa Llorenç Villalonga in Binissalem; Can Llobera in Pollensa; the Institució Alcover in Manacor, among others.
Between them, these four centres capture these different elements of the island's literary tradition. Graves, the poet, the novelist, weaving an alien's perspective into a Mallorcan framework; Villalonga, the author of the modern tradition with his at times scathing insights into the presence of the early tourists (well before the boom); Miquel Costa i Llobera, fundamental to the new school of Mallorcan poetry and literature; Antoni Maria Alcover, the keeper of the oral tradition, the promoter of the fantastic and the folkloric - Mallorca's "rondalles", the island's fairy and other folk tales.
But of these, there is an intermingling of elements. Costa i Llobera's "El Pi de Formentor", perhaps the best known of all Mallorca's poems, was one of the purest expressions of the Mallorcan imagination, borrowing from a folk tradition inspired by the landscape. Graves drew on this landscape, one that had enchanted and captivated him. For Villalonga, there was the shifting nature of society and how it determined the landscape, and he was one who was as willing to highlight local pretensions - those of Mallorca's nobility - as he was those of the incomers.
These are, though, but a select few of the writers that the walks embrace. There are all the others, the familiar and less familiar: the Archduke Louis Salvador, Agatha Christie, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Alcover, Rafel Ginard. And there is also Jules Verne, whose place in Mallorca's literary and touristic past is often overlooked. When a nascent tourism industry was founded in the early twentieth century, it was to France that Mallorca looked as much as it ever did to Britain. This was to be tourism akin to the French Riviera, a winter tourism of mild weather before the Americans, French and Germans invented the suntan and so the whole notion of the summer vacation. And with winter in mind, there is also George Sand and her variously complimentary and condemnatory observations of Valldemossa and Mallorca.
I am intrigued by Walking on Words. Intrigued but also pleased. At the launch presentation, they handed out a map. A map of Mallorca with the routes and the authors. A map of Mallorca's imagination. I salute them.
For more information, go to the website: www.walkingonwords.com.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Stories Of The Squares: "Café de Plaça"
Plaça. Plaza. Square. Anyone fancy having a guess as to how many squares there are in Mallorca? A thousand? Ten thousand? More? I've no idea and I'm certainly not about to try and count them, but even were I to, the task would be made more difficult by what constitutes a square. It should be obvious - things on all four sides, as a general guideline - but there are squares that don't conform to this model: they are just parts, bits of something else, a promenade or a street which, for unknown reasons, acquire a plaça in their names.
The square is the heart of the village, but at times it's hard to be sure which square is most at heart. A Plaça Major should be a clue. Or a Plaça de l'Ajuntament perhaps, the square in front of the town hall. In some places, they could have either name. Sa Pobla, for instance. Its Major is looked across from the Ajuntament, and from the Major one can look to the first floor and observe the mayor on the phone. Squares, town halls, mayors - essences of Mallorcan life.
There are squares in some towns or villages which have attained such square-like status that they no longer both referring to it by name. It is just the square. Sa Plaça. Sineu is probably a good example.
The squares have their stories to tell, the ones that exist in some of the names. Some stories are simple and obvious. Mercat, the market. Vila, the town. Others require explanation. Puerto Pollensa has its market/church square, but the name is actually Plaça Miquel Capllonch, a composer and pianist who was born in Pollensa. Lloret has Jaume I, the conquering king of the thirteenth century. Petra has its Ramon Llull and its Fray Juniper Serra, tributes to two of the greats of Mallorca's history, one of whom, Serra, was born in Petra.
Integral to the stories of the squares are the bars and cafes. The social lives of the years have been played out, related and discussed and been abstractly engrained into their walls by the coffee, wine and cigarettes of reminiscence. Their stories are those of the oral tradition, the hand-me-down, word-of-mouth transmission of the collective memory. Some bars become iconic, enduring; some change, modernise. But whatever happens to the bar, the square remains unaltered, save for paving, for new town hall street furniture, for renewed lights.
Alcúdia has its squares but it is a town that has more than just the conveying of stories over tables and on terraces. It has a story, a written one and one that has been dramatised. The bar, the cafe, the square combine. In 1965, Alexandre Cuéllar put them together. He wrote the "records" of the "Café de Plaça", loosely based on a cafe in the Plaça Constitució - Constitution Square.
Cuéllar was actually born in Catalonia, but he came to Mallorca and was, from 1943 to 1959, the secretary at Sa Pobla's town hall. He then returned to Olot in the Gerona province and worked at its town hall until he retired in 1979. But he had retained his links with Mallorca and was to strengthen them on his retirement. He had a summer residence in Barcares, a hamlet of enchantment on Alcúdia's Pollensa bay extremity.
It was while he was summering in Alcúdia that he would go to the square. He was, as he said in a 1996 interview (he died in 2006 at the age of 92), suffering a great nostalgia for Mallorca back in Olot. He felt separated from the island and from the people. Hence, he wrote his finest work - "Café de Plaça". The stories in the book, or the records as they are referred to, were, he was to admit, a reflection of an idyll, of a passing from a former time to a modern one, with the regret that came with it. In 1965 tourism was changing everything, even though the square remained as it had been and the cafe was still unaffected.
Cuéllar's book can be misunderstood. A key theme of it was what he called "blessed laziness". It can be taken as a criticism, but mostly everyone at the time he wrote it (and nowadays also) fully understood his point. The laziness was part of life, as was the contrariness that the stories identify. They were stories that accurately portrayed the almost total stillness of Mallorcan village existence. Nothing much happened. Everyone would congregate at the cafe and when there was actually work to be done, a good excuse would be found to have lunch instead.
The dramatisation is the final scene of the five-part Via Fora production which takes place around Alcúdia's walls (the next one is on 27 August). It is of course all in Catalan, but the high farce of the laziness is easy to appreciate. It is a performance of a story of one cafe, in one square, in one village at one time in the past: fifty years ago. It could have been written about any of the ... . How many squares do you reckon there are?
The square is the heart of the village, but at times it's hard to be sure which square is most at heart. A Plaça Major should be a clue. Or a Plaça de l'Ajuntament perhaps, the square in front of the town hall. In some places, they could have either name. Sa Pobla, for instance. Its Major is looked across from the Ajuntament, and from the Major one can look to the first floor and observe the mayor on the phone. Squares, town halls, mayors - essences of Mallorcan life.
There are squares in some towns or villages which have attained such square-like status that they no longer both referring to it by name. It is just the square. Sa Plaça. Sineu is probably a good example.
The squares have their stories to tell, the ones that exist in some of the names. Some stories are simple and obvious. Mercat, the market. Vila, the town. Others require explanation. Puerto Pollensa has its market/church square, but the name is actually Plaça Miquel Capllonch, a composer and pianist who was born in Pollensa. Lloret has Jaume I, the conquering king of the thirteenth century. Petra has its Ramon Llull and its Fray Juniper Serra, tributes to two of the greats of Mallorca's history, one of whom, Serra, was born in Petra.
Integral to the stories of the squares are the bars and cafes. The social lives of the years have been played out, related and discussed and been abstractly engrained into their walls by the coffee, wine and cigarettes of reminiscence. Their stories are those of the oral tradition, the hand-me-down, word-of-mouth transmission of the collective memory. Some bars become iconic, enduring; some change, modernise. But whatever happens to the bar, the square remains unaltered, save for paving, for new town hall street furniture, for renewed lights.
Alcúdia has its squares but it is a town that has more than just the conveying of stories over tables and on terraces. It has a story, a written one and one that has been dramatised. The bar, the cafe, the square combine. In 1965, Alexandre Cuéllar put them together. He wrote the "records" of the "Café de Plaça", loosely based on a cafe in the Plaça Constitució - Constitution Square.
Cuéllar was actually born in Catalonia, but he came to Mallorca and was, from 1943 to 1959, the secretary at Sa Pobla's town hall. He then returned to Olot in the Gerona province and worked at its town hall until he retired in 1979. But he had retained his links with Mallorca and was to strengthen them on his retirement. He had a summer residence in Barcares, a hamlet of enchantment on Alcúdia's Pollensa bay extremity.
It was while he was summering in Alcúdia that he would go to the square. He was, as he said in a 1996 interview (he died in 2006 at the age of 92), suffering a great nostalgia for Mallorca back in Olot. He felt separated from the island and from the people. Hence, he wrote his finest work - "Café de Plaça". The stories in the book, or the records as they are referred to, were, he was to admit, a reflection of an idyll, of a passing from a former time to a modern one, with the regret that came with it. In 1965 tourism was changing everything, even though the square remained as it had been and the cafe was still unaffected.
Cuéllar's book can be misunderstood. A key theme of it was what he called "blessed laziness". It can be taken as a criticism, but mostly everyone at the time he wrote it (and nowadays also) fully understood his point. The laziness was part of life, as was the contrariness that the stories identify. They were stories that accurately portrayed the almost total stillness of Mallorcan village existence. Nothing much happened. Everyone would congregate at the cafe and when there was actually work to be done, a good excuse would be found to have lunch instead.
The dramatisation is the final scene of the five-part Via Fora production which takes place around Alcúdia's walls (the next one is on 27 August). It is of course all in Catalan, but the high farce of the laziness is easy to appreciate. It is a performance of a story of one cafe, in one square, in one village at one time in the past: fifty years ago. It could have been written about any of the ... . How many squares do you reckon there are?
Sunday, April 20, 2014
The Book Of The Absurd
Gabriel García Márquez should have held on for a few more days, preferably until the twenty-second or the twenty-third of the month. Had it been the twenty-second, he would have died on the same day in 1616 as Miguel de Cervantes. If the twenty-third, it would have been the same day as Cervantes was buried. It would also have been World Book Day and Saint George's Day, aka (in Catalan) the Diada de Sant Jordi.
García Márquez was the modern Cervantes; his story-telling elevated him to an equal status. They are the two greatest novelists in the Spanish language and they both left an enormous legacy. With Cervantes it was "Don Quijote" and quixotism. García Márquez gave us the epic "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" and magical realism. This combination of the everyday with the fantastical will not pass into dictionary usage in the way that quixotism has, but magical realism is an enduring element of contemporary culture. The juxtaposition of the normal and the absurd can, for example, describe much comedy. As such, García Márquez placed the real next to the surreal. It was story-telling with a splash of Dalism.
There was a common thread to these two literary greats' work. The absurd. A reason why Cervantes is still so meaningful today is that quixotism, the pursuit of impractical ideals that can lead to absurd consequences, might be used as a metaphor for certain political, societal or business aims. If one were being really harsh, one might describe the whole European "project" as quixotic. But then one would have to have a real downer on Europe in order to do so.
The death of García Márquez has been met in Spain with grief tempered with pride at his literary achievements. But though he attained a status to match Cervantes, for the Spanish there is one very crucial difference. He wasn't Spanish. He was a standard-bearer for the Spanish language and so therefore for the notion of "Spanishness", but having been Colombian he can't be claimed as Spain's own.
Placing Cervantes and García Márquez on a similar pedestal, one separated by over three centuries, should offer a pause for thought. Despite a rich literary tradition, Spanish has failed to produce novelists or other writers of genuinely global legendary status. Cervantes died, remarkably enough, only one day before William Shakespeare, just one writer in English among numerous others with legendary status. Germany has given several - Böll, the Brothers Grimm, Grass, Hesse, Thomas Mann. French has been about as prolific as English - Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile Zola, the list goes on.
Spain possessed global presence and the Spanish language still possesses global diffusion and usage. A one-time great power, criteria were in place for literary cultural export in the original language and in translation. Yet somehow, it never really happened in the sense that Spanish writers did not attain the reputations of those from other major European powers. I am trying to think of a good explanation as to why, but I'm struggling.
One conclusion might be that Spain, regardless of one-time empire and that global presence, was and remained on the cultural periphery in European terms. But if this was the case with written culture, the same can't be said for other artistic endeavours. In the last century alone, Spain provided three towering figures to the world of art - Dali, Miró and Picasso. It has also provided the greatest of all - Francisco de Goya.
Whatever the reason, it will probably not be being mulled over too closely on 23 April. Thanks to some clever marketing by Spanish book publishers back in 1923, the burial date of Cervantes was chosen to be the day of the book. It has since become a worldwide "day", having been adopted by UNESCO. That the day happens to also be St. George's Day is just a coincidence. But the Diada de Sant Jordi is as much to do with books - more so in fact - than a saint's day.
Almost inevitably, the day is a day to proudly promote a Catalan literary tradition that was, for so many years during the last century, buried by proscription. In Sa Pobla there is a special honouring of Miquel López Crespí, a native of the town, a writer, novelist, poet and historian.
López Crespí will not be a familiar name. It is certainly not one that has travelled round the world. Yet here is a remarkable man who as a teenager was arrested in 1963 and tortured because of his opposition to the Franco regime. In honouring him, there is an honouring also, thanks to Ramon Llull, of a literary tradition - one in Catalan - which predates Spanish tradition. As a man of literature, López Crespí will doubtless recognise the greats in Castellano - Cervantes and García Márquez. But he would doubtless also reflect on the absurd. Books, in whatever language, should not be proscribed.
García Márquez was the modern Cervantes; his story-telling elevated him to an equal status. They are the two greatest novelists in the Spanish language and they both left an enormous legacy. With Cervantes it was "Don Quijote" and quixotism. García Márquez gave us the epic "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" and magical realism. This combination of the everyday with the fantastical will not pass into dictionary usage in the way that quixotism has, but magical realism is an enduring element of contemporary culture. The juxtaposition of the normal and the absurd can, for example, describe much comedy. As such, García Márquez placed the real next to the surreal. It was story-telling with a splash of Dalism.
There was a common thread to these two literary greats' work. The absurd. A reason why Cervantes is still so meaningful today is that quixotism, the pursuit of impractical ideals that can lead to absurd consequences, might be used as a metaphor for certain political, societal or business aims. If one were being really harsh, one might describe the whole European "project" as quixotic. But then one would have to have a real downer on Europe in order to do so.
The death of García Márquez has been met in Spain with grief tempered with pride at his literary achievements. But though he attained a status to match Cervantes, for the Spanish there is one very crucial difference. He wasn't Spanish. He was a standard-bearer for the Spanish language and so therefore for the notion of "Spanishness", but having been Colombian he can't be claimed as Spain's own.
Placing Cervantes and García Márquez on a similar pedestal, one separated by over three centuries, should offer a pause for thought. Despite a rich literary tradition, Spanish has failed to produce novelists or other writers of genuinely global legendary status. Cervantes died, remarkably enough, only one day before William Shakespeare, just one writer in English among numerous others with legendary status. Germany has given several - Böll, the Brothers Grimm, Grass, Hesse, Thomas Mann. French has been about as prolific as English - Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile Zola, the list goes on.
Spain possessed global presence and the Spanish language still possesses global diffusion and usage. A one-time great power, criteria were in place for literary cultural export in the original language and in translation. Yet somehow, it never really happened in the sense that Spanish writers did not attain the reputations of those from other major European powers. I am trying to think of a good explanation as to why, but I'm struggling.
One conclusion might be that Spain, regardless of one-time empire and that global presence, was and remained on the cultural periphery in European terms. But if this was the case with written culture, the same can't be said for other artistic endeavours. In the last century alone, Spain provided three towering figures to the world of art - Dali, Miró and Picasso. It has also provided the greatest of all - Francisco de Goya.
Whatever the reason, it will probably not be being mulled over too closely on 23 April. Thanks to some clever marketing by Spanish book publishers back in 1923, the burial date of Cervantes was chosen to be the day of the book. It has since become a worldwide "day", having been adopted by UNESCO. That the day happens to also be St. George's Day is just a coincidence. But the Diada de Sant Jordi is as much to do with books - more so in fact - than a saint's day.
Almost inevitably, the day is a day to proudly promote a Catalan literary tradition that was, for so many years during the last century, buried by proscription. In Sa Pobla there is a special honouring of Miquel López Crespí, a native of the town, a writer, novelist, poet and historian.
López Crespí will not be a familiar name. It is certainly not one that has travelled round the world. Yet here is a remarkable man who as a teenager was arrested in 1963 and tortured because of his opposition to the Franco regime. In honouring him, there is an honouring also, thanks to Ramon Llull, of a literary tradition - one in Catalan - which predates Spanish tradition. As a man of literature, López Crespí will doubtless recognise the greats in Castellano - Cervantes and García Márquez. But he would doubtless also reflect on the absurd. Books, in whatever language, should not be proscribed.
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
Stories Of Mallorca: Catalan books
You might not have realised that there is a book fair currently taking place in Palma. It is the 25th Week of the Book in Catalan, which is probably why you wouldn't have realised. But it is an important occasion for celebrating Catalan literature and for showcasing Mallorcan authors, and as with anything to do with the Catalan language, it hasn't entirely been spared some controversy. At the opening event, there was a bit of a rumpus (a quiet one admittedly) when some people left when the vice-president for culture at the Council of Mallorca, Joan Rotger, got up to speak. It was a tad ungracious; the Council is, after all, sponsoring the Week. But, and one presumes this to have been the case, anything which is even remotely linked to the Partido Popular will cause some to be upset and so to walk out on someone's speech.
It was especially ungracious, given that Rotger said that the Week was an indication of the vitality and strength of Catalan and that the language was "vigorous, dynamic and creative" and had "a great future". He did admit there were one or two "difficulties" surrounding the language, but he deserved better than to be snubbed, albeit by a minority.
A Catalan book week might not seem that significant, but it is, and in more ways than just being a celebration of contemporary and past writers. Catalan literature holds a very special place in European literary history, and that very special place came about because of a Mallorcan. Yep, it's that ancient polymath again, Ramon Llull. The old boy wrote what is commonly thought to have been the first European novel, and he wrote it in Catalan. This novel, "Blanquerna", was a ripping yarn in the style of ripping yarns of the thirteenth century. Llull, who walked out on his missus and left her to raise their two kids when he had a sudden religious awakening, became a staunch Catholic, so much so that he was instrumental in confirming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, but this religiosity, in a mediaeval manner, did not prevent him from creating a novel that was typical of storytelling of the period. Putting it bluntly, there was a fair amount of sex.
There was also a good deal of the stuff of legends. The hero, Blanquerna, appears destined for an unremarkable life until he informs his parents that he intends to devote himself to God. This he does and eventually becomes pope, at which point he decides to take himself off and become a hermit so that he can really communicate with God. The character of Blanquerna was partly autobiographical, but rather than walking out on the family, Blanquerna convinces his girlfriend, Natana, to devote herself to God as well, and so she gets herself to a nunnery.
Llull wrote the novel some twenty years after he had seen the light and left the marital home. It did entail a certain reinterpretation of his own history, but there were probably few readers who would have been aware of this. The book, which was a sort of bestseller of the times, was written in Montpellier, a city that added to its Catalan credibility because of its association with Jaume I, the conquerer of Mallorca and bringer of Catalan to the island. And there was, arguably, a further confirmation of Catalanism in the very story of Blanquerna becoming a hermit. Sant Antoni, he of the January fiesta, was revered in Catalonia before he became a feature of Mallorcan life, and Antoni was himself a hermit whose cult was promulgated by Jaume's Mallorcan king descendants.
So, a Catalan book week in Mallorca is in a way a celebration of what was written 731 years ago in 1283. And if "Blanquerna" was a bestseller back in the day, what are the hot titles of today? At the book fair the two which have been shifting the most copies are a collection of "gloses" by Llorenç Moya that were written under the pseudonym "Xafarder" and which were originally published in "Ultima Hora" in the late 1970s and a novel by Neus Canyelles in which the heroine, an author/journalist, rewrites classic stories in a way that fits with her own personal story.
It is probably safe to say, though, that neither of these titles or any others at the book fair are about to break out, be translated widely and become international bestsellers. Mallorcan literature remains something of a closed book, its authors unknown. Canyelles once wrote "La Novella de Dickens", which involved the heroine in conversation with Dickens. It's not fair to compare, but Dickens knew a thing or two about storytelling and about describing time and place. One day, someone will write a book about Mallorca that really tells the story, be it in Catalan or any other language.
It was especially ungracious, given that Rotger said that the Week was an indication of the vitality and strength of Catalan and that the language was "vigorous, dynamic and creative" and had "a great future". He did admit there were one or two "difficulties" surrounding the language, but he deserved better than to be snubbed, albeit by a minority.
A Catalan book week might not seem that significant, but it is, and in more ways than just being a celebration of contemporary and past writers. Catalan literature holds a very special place in European literary history, and that very special place came about because of a Mallorcan. Yep, it's that ancient polymath again, Ramon Llull. The old boy wrote what is commonly thought to have been the first European novel, and he wrote it in Catalan. This novel, "Blanquerna", was a ripping yarn in the style of ripping yarns of the thirteenth century. Llull, who walked out on his missus and left her to raise their two kids when he had a sudden religious awakening, became a staunch Catholic, so much so that he was instrumental in confirming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, but this religiosity, in a mediaeval manner, did not prevent him from creating a novel that was typical of storytelling of the period. Putting it bluntly, there was a fair amount of sex.
There was also a good deal of the stuff of legends. The hero, Blanquerna, appears destined for an unremarkable life until he informs his parents that he intends to devote himself to God. This he does and eventually becomes pope, at which point he decides to take himself off and become a hermit so that he can really communicate with God. The character of Blanquerna was partly autobiographical, but rather than walking out on the family, Blanquerna convinces his girlfriend, Natana, to devote herself to God as well, and so she gets herself to a nunnery.
Llull wrote the novel some twenty years after he had seen the light and left the marital home. It did entail a certain reinterpretation of his own history, but there were probably few readers who would have been aware of this. The book, which was a sort of bestseller of the times, was written in Montpellier, a city that added to its Catalan credibility because of its association with Jaume I, the conquerer of Mallorca and bringer of Catalan to the island. And there was, arguably, a further confirmation of Catalanism in the very story of Blanquerna becoming a hermit. Sant Antoni, he of the January fiesta, was revered in Catalonia before he became a feature of Mallorcan life, and Antoni was himself a hermit whose cult was promulgated by Jaume's Mallorcan king descendants.
So, a Catalan book week in Mallorca is in a way a celebration of what was written 731 years ago in 1283. And if "Blanquerna" was a bestseller back in the day, what are the hot titles of today? At the book fair the two which have been shifting the most copies are a collection of "gloses" by Llorenç Moya that were written under the pseudonym "Xafarder" and which were originally published in "Ultima Hora" in the late 1970s and a novel by Neus Canyelles in which the heroine, an author/journalist, rewrites classic stories in a way that fits with her own personal story.
It is probably safe to say, though, that neither of these titles or any others at the book fair are about to break out, be translated widely and become international bestsellers. Mallorcan literature remains something of a closed book, its authors unknown. Canyelles once wrote "La Novella de Dickens", which involved the heroine in conversation with Dickens. It's not fair to compare, but Dickens knew a thing or two about storytelling and about describing time and place. One day, someone will write a book about Mallorca that really tells the story, be it in Catalan or any other language.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Great Expectations: The Mallorcan novel
When I was small, and before we moved and the books mostly ended up in the new house's loft, the dining-room had two immense bookcases. There were any number of popular paperbacks, Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins were both favourites of my father, and huge numbers of hardbacks. These were almost all austere in appearance. Some had dust jackets, but most didn't. They were simple, usually brown in colour with the book's title and author's name embossed in fake gold.
The look of seriousness of the hardbacks appealed to me for some reason; possibly because, so sparing were they by way of external information, that they hinted at mystery. From an early age I became aware of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, all in hardback. But there was one author and one author alone who stood out. Charles Dickens.
The explanation as to why Dickens probably had much to do with the fact that films of his stories were regularly on television. I'm not sure that I understood what I was reading, and would retreat to the safety of Captain W. E. Johns when it all became too complicated, but "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" were more than just Alec Guinness or John Mills on the box.
Dickens, were he to still be alive, would have been 200 hundred years old on 7 February. The timeliness of his birth was such that he was perfectly placed to become what he did become - the novelist as social historian and commentator of Victorian times.
Great literature does not have to be contemporaneous in order to acquire the status of great literature, but as a chronicle of the author's own time it can have a credibility over and above that gleaned from research and/or imagination of the past or the future. Dickens was a maker of documentaries long before film or television. In having dealt almost exclusively with the present, his work is profoundly significant as a social record.
The anniversary of Dickens' birth has received a goodly amount of interest and coverage in Mallorca and Spain. In local literary circles he is revered as having been the great author that he was. "Literature would not have been the same without Dickens." So says Palma-born Neus Canyelles, whose fifth book was a novel entitled "La Novella de Dickens" in which an hallucinating heroine holds conversations with Dickens.
The reverence shown towards Dickens just serves to emphasise the fact that Mallorca and the Balearics, for all that there is a strong literary tradition which is taken seriously and proudly, have never produced an author whose works have truly broken out of the islands or Spain and provoked international acclaim.
The one author who has come closest is Llorenç Villalonga. His two best-known works, "Mort de Dama" and "Bearn", published 25 years apart, acquired such a reputation, in Mallorca if nowhere else, that it has been suggested that they inhibited the development of subsequent Mallorcan literature.
Both books had as their theme the Mallorcan aristocracy. To what extent this, as a subject, would hold great appeal to wider audiences is debatable. Nevertheless, they contained some sense of social record.
What is missing, perhaps more than anything where the foreigner is concerned, is an appreciation of this social record of Mallorca. It exists through photography and other media, but through literature there is an almost complete absence because of a lack of translated works. There is no Dickens or anyone who comes anywhere near. Nor is there any contemporary writer who might facilitate a greater awareness of the Mallorcan social condition.
Television and the internet have taken on this mantle to a degree, but neither can do justice in the way that literature can. There are commentators of a different type, the glosadors, who specialise in often improvised, satirical quasi-song monologues, but who can understand any of them? Where literature is concerned, Mallorca is an unwritten book with totally blank pages.
A novelist such as Neus Canyelles can re-create a world in which Dickens appears. She, along with others in the Mallorcan literary tradition, can appreciate the social condition of Victorian England. She can understand Dickens' world because it is an open book.
Without equivalents, a foreigner's appreciation can never be more than superficial. And this superficiality applies both to the past and to the present day. Consequently, and for many people, Mallorca is surface and no more. There is no substance to the island. Somewhere there must be someone who some day will rectify the situation. The great Mallorcan novel has yet to be written.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The look of seriousness of the hardbacks appealed to me for some reason; possibly because, so sparing were they by way of external information, that they hinted at mystery. From an early age I became aware of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, all in hardback. But there was one author and one author alone who stood out. Charles Dickens.
The explanation as to why Dickens probably had much to do with the fact that films of his stories were regularly on television. I'm not sure that I understood what I was reading, and would retreat to the safety of Captain W. E. Johns when it all became too complicated, but "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" were more than just Alec Guinness or John Mills on the box.
Dickens, were he to still be alive, would have been 200 hundred years old on 7 February. The timeliness of his birth was such that he was perfectly placed to become what he did become - the novelist as social historian and commentator of Victorian times.
Great literature does not have to be contemporaneous in order to acquire the status of great literature, but as a chronicle of the author's own time it can have a credibility over and above that gleaned from research and/or imagination of the past or the future. Dickens was a maker of documentaries long before film or television. In having dealt almost exclusively with the present, his work is profoundly significant as a social record.
The anniversary of Dickens' birth has received a goodly amount of interest and coverage in Mallorca and Spain. In local literary circles he is revered as having been the great author that he was. "Literature would not have been the same without Dickens." So says Palma-born Neus Canyelles, whose fifth book was a novel entitled "La Novella de Dickens" in which an hallucinating heroine holds conversations with Dickens.
The reverence shown towards Dickens just serves to emphasise the fact that Mallorca and the Balearics, for all that there is a strong literary tradition which is taken seriously and proudly, have never produced an author whose works have truly broken out of the islands or Spain and provoked international acclaim.
The one author who has come closest is Llorenç Villalonga. His two best-known works, "Mort de Dama" and "Bearn", published 25 years apart, acquired such a reputation, in Mallorca if nowhere else, that it has been suggested that they inhibited the development of subsequent Mallorcan literature.
Both books had as their theme the Mallorcan aristocracy. To what extent this, as a subject, would hold great appeal to wider audiences is debatable. Nevertheless, they contained some sense of social record.
What is missing, perhaps more than anything where the foreigner is concerned, is an appreciation of this social record of Mallorca. It exists through photography and other media, but through literature there is an almost complete absence because of a lack of translated works. There is no Dickens or anyone who comes anywhere near. Nor is there any contemporary writer who might facilitate a greater awareness of the Mallorcan social condition.
Television and the internet have taken on this mantle to a degree, but neither can do justice in the way that literature can. There are commentators of a different type, the glosadors, who specialise in often improvised, satirical quasi-song monologues, but who can understand any of them? Where literature is concerned, Mallorca is an unwritten book with totally blank pages.
A novelist such as Neus Canyelles can re-create a world in which Dickens appears. She, along with others in the Mallorcan literary tradition, can appreciate the social condition of Victorian England. She can understand Dickens' world because it is an open book.
Without equivalents, a foreigner's appreciation can never be more than superficial. And this superficiality applies both to the past and to the present day. Consequently, and for many people, Mallorca is surface and no more. There is no substance to the island. Somewhere there must be someone who some day will rectify the situation. The great Mallorcan novel has yet to be written.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
MALLORCA TODAY - A new festival for Pollensa
With the appointment of a new director for the Pollensa Music Festival, the anticipation is that the festival will embrace other elements of the arts, notably cinema and literature. The concept should be in place for next year, but a question is: where's the funding coming from?
Monday, April 25, 2011
Something To Remind You: Books
It was St. George's Day on Saturday. Sant Jordi's day. It was also the day of the book and of the curious ritual of exchanging a rose for a book. What happens nowadays? Do Interflora and Amazon both deliver?
The personal may be being taken out of many aspects of life, the Kindle and the iPad may be assuming greater significance, but the book itself endures. Rather like vinyl, the book is more substantial, more tangible than a disc or the physically non-existent, the download. It is more personal.
In Palma, they celebrated book day. Politicians took the opportunity to celebrate some time as last men and women standing. Before they succumb to their probable fate in May, the regional president and the mayor of Palma were among the visitors. Antich was talking a good book, or was he a talking book? The next legislature will introduce initiatives to develop reading, so he said. The education minister was on hand to echo this and to insist that it was necessary to give strength to plans for reading development. What have they been doing for the past four years?
Reading, sales of books, financial assistance for parental purchase of books; these all crop up among the statistics that are regularly trotted out in the press. More than literature, Mallorca has been creating a generation that can read figures rather than prose. The attention that is paid to reading does, though, emphasise the role of the book in local society.
But this same society has been bemoaning standards. Last September, at the literary gathering in Formentor of book publishers, concern was expressed at the fact that children no longer had the "experience of the book". Public education is sub-standard enough for it to have been admitted that, while children read, if not as much as they might, they don't understand. Levels of comprehension in Mallorca and the Balearics, along with other core benchmarks in education, are below those of the Spanish average and well below those of Europe as a whole.
Despite a tradition of the book and literature, Mallorca has produced little by way of great works. Not on an international scale, at any rate. Yet, the island can lay claim to being the birthplace of the European novel. Ramon Llull's "Blanquerna", written in the thirteenth century, is often held up as the first of its kind. It was written in Catalan, emphasising the importance of the language in civilising mediaeval European society, something that is conveniently overlooked by many.
There was a mere gap of some 700 years before something approximating to a great work about Mallorca came along, Llorenç Villalonga's "Bearn" about the fall of the Mallorcan nobility. But for most people outside Mallorca, both it and Llull's work are obscure and generally ignored. A more recent Mallorcan literary tradition hasn't been one at all, but a foreign invasion of Peter Mayle-apeing pap.
For the visitor, Mallorca and books mean not the unknowns such as Villalonga, but what gets thrown into the suitcase. Holidays are reading time; for many, the only time they read a book. New technologies may spawn greater interest in reading, but the Kindle is still subject to the same drawbacks as the book on holiday: Ambre Solaire thumbmarks and grains of sand working themselves into the crevices.
The book on holiday can take on greater significance than merely a means of whiling away some hours on a beach or by the poolside. It is a remembrance, something to remind you. I know exactly where I was when I read William Trevor's gut-wrenchingly sad "The Story of Lucy Gault" or when I laughed hysterically at the insanely irreverent "Henry Root Letters".
Both are somewhere, among all the other books, the old copies of "Wisden", the Ian McEwan first editions, the translation of the bible for the Inquisition, the "Malleus Maleficarum". These are my own descendants of what I grew up among - Hemingway, Dickens and the less cerebral Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins.
The day of the book is a fine idea. There should be more of them. If only as a reminder of the greater aesthetic of the book. It can be read, but it can also be seen as a single object and even smelt. The new technologies don't offer the same pleasure and appeal to the senses.
In years to come, will the day of the book become the day of the electronic book? Stalls of handheld devices? Will the exchange of gifts mean a rose for a Kindle? I very much doubt it.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The personal may be being taken out of many aspects of life, the Kindle and the iPad may be assuming greater significance, but the book itself endures. Rather like vinyl, the book is more substantial, more tangible than a disc or the physically non-existent, the download. It is more personal.
In Palma, they celebrated book day. Politicians took the opportunity to celebrate some time as last men and women standing. Before they succumb to their probable fate in May, the regional president and the mayor of Palma were among the visitors. Antich was talking a good book, or was he a talking book? The next legislature will introduce initiatives to develop reading, so he said. The education minister was on hand to echo this and to insist that it was necessary to give strength to plans for reading development. What have they been doing for the past four years?
Reading, sales of books, financial assistance for parental purchase of books; these all crop up among the statistics that are regularly trotted out in the press. More than literature, Mallorca has been creating a generation that can read figures rather than prose. The attention that is paid to reading does, though, emphasise the role of the book in local society.
But this same society has been bemoaning standards. Last September, at the literary gathering in Formentor of book publishers, concern was expressed at the fact that children no longer had the "experience of the book". Public education is sub-standard enough for it to have been admitted that, while children read, if not as much as they might, they don't understand. Levels of comprehension in Mallorca and the Balearics, along with other core benchmarks in education, are below those of the Spanish average and well below those of Europe as a whole.
Despite a tradition of the book and literature, Mallorca has produced little by way of great works. Not on an international scale, at any rate. Yet, the island can lay claim to being the birthplace of the European novel. Ramon Llull's "Blanquerna", written in the thirteenth century, is often held up as the first of its kind. It was written in Catalan, emphasising the importance of the language in civilising mediaeval European society, something that is conveniently overlooked by many.
There was a mere gap of some 700 years before something approximating to a great work about Mallorca came along, Llorenç Villalonga's "Bearn" about the fall of the Mallorcan nobility. But for most people outside Mallorca, both it and Llull's work are obscure and generally ignored. A more recent Mallorcan literary tradition hasn't been one at all, but a foreign invasion of Peter Mayle-apeing pap.
For the visitor, Mallorca and books mean not the unknowns such as Villalonga, but what gets thrown into the suitcase. Holidays are reading time; for many, the only time they read a book. New technologies may spawn greater interest in reading, but the Kindle is still subject to the same drawbacks as the book on holiday: Ambre Solaire thumbmarks and grains of sand working themselves into the crevices.
The book on holiday can take on greater significance than merely a means of whiling away some hours on a beach or by the poolside. It is a remembrance, something to remind you. I know exactly where I was when I read William Trevor's gut-wrenchingly sad "The Story of Lucy Gault" or when I laughed hysterically at the insanely irreverent "Henry Root Letters".
Both are somewhere, among all the other books, the old copies of "Wisden", the Ian McEwan first editions, the translation of the bible for the Inquisition, the "Malleus Maleficarum". These are my own descendants of what I grew up among - Hemingway, Dickens and the less cerebral Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins.
The day of the book is a fine idea. There should be more of them. If only as a reminder of the greater aesthetic of the book. It can be read, but it can also be seen as a single object and even smelt. The new technologies don't offer the same pleasure and appeal to the senses.
In years to come, will the day of the book become the day of the electronic book? Stalls of handheld devices? Will the exchange of gifts mean a rose for a Kindle? I very much doubt it.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Read You Like A Book: Literature, culture and technology
A week or so ago there was some navel-gazing going on. It was at a literary gathering known as Conversaciones de Formentor. Book publishers, Spanish and Mallorcan, were bemoaning what they see as the impoverishment of culture and lack of demand for more serious literature.
Books and their reading do not escape the obsessiveness with which statistics are presented on almost every aspect of Mallorcan life. Suffice it to say that reading is down, this in a wider Catalan society that can produce something as massive as the Sunday book market in Barcelona. There are all sorts of explanations as to why, one of them being media companies which contribute to what the publishers perceive as the increasing banality of local culture.
The publishers accept that new technologies can be enriching, but they worry - as many others worry - about children not growing up being "imbued with the experience of the book". But are they right to be so concerned? They might be right in being uneasy at the proliferation of the inane, an X Factor winner's fascinating autobiography for example, but technology might actually be the saviour of the book - serious or otherwise - and of children's (and adults') reading. At least this is what Amazon and Apple would like us to believe. When the publishers argue that "educational reform should not be limited to facilitating children's use of a computer", they overlook the potentially powerful symbiosis between technology and literature.
A recent book, assuming anyone's read it, has advanced the theory that the internet is changing the way we think. Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" has provoked a debate as it argues that the net has altered how we read and use our memories. Carr himself has said that "the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle". I can sympathise, when it comes to reading online. A mistake newspaper publishers are making in hoping for a mass migration to paid-for online newspapers is that they neglect the distractions of the internet. You can be reading something and suddenly the urge takes you elsewhere. Where do you want to go today? Why pay for something if you realise you're not going to read it?
Apple, with its iPad, offers a potentially whole brave new world for book reading. The iBooks application is but one part of the iPad, which, by coincidence or perhaps by design, an official video from the company described as feeling right "in the same way it just feels right to hold a book or magazine or newspaper". But the iPad is sold on the basis of its multiple applications; the distractions to go somewhere else, other than the book, are enormous. Amazon's Kindle is more straightforward. A promo video for the latest Kindle features a far from unattractive young lady sitting on a deckchair on a sunny beach, tucking into what may or may not be Jane Austen. Go anywhere, download anywhere, read anywhere is a seductive argument, but just how popular is it? Amazon claims millions of sales; an independent estimate suggests they are not as strong as the company would have them. Nevertheless, there may be more than just wishful thinking to Amazon's advertising which portrays the product's coolness for youngsters and for those who had never previously read a book.
But you still come back to the banality that the publishers were complaining about. The iPad or any computer hooked up to the internet doesn't overcome the greatest banalities of all - those sometimes perpetrated in the name of social networking via the likes of Facebook, recently described by the president of the Balearics' division of the Spanish consumers assocation FACUA as - and I am quoting him out of context - "the greatest evil that has been invented in the world". It isn't that (he was specifically referring to some more unpleasant aspects of Facebook), but it does contribute to a growing sense of abbreviated communication, part of a wider issue of a failure to concentrate, which is the product of what Carr is saying.
Mallorcan literary heritage is hardly a thing of international acclaim, but book reading locally has long been taken seriously. Whether what is being read is serious or not, if the publishers are concerned as to a decline in reading (and the statistics would bear this out), then they should perhaps be embracing, if they haven't already, the new technologies. Whether these really work though is still very much an unanswered question.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Books and their reading do not escape the obsessiveness with which statistics are presented on almost every aspect of Mallorcan life. Suffice it to say that reading is down, this in a wider Catalan society that can produce something as massive as the Sunday book market in Barcelona. There are all sorts of explanations as to why, one of them being media companies which contribute to what the publishers perceive as the increasing banality of local culture.
The publishers accept that new technologies can be enriching, but they worry - as many others worry - about children not growing up being "imbued with the experience of the book". But are they right to be so concerned? They might be right in being uneasy at the proliferation of the inane, an X Factor winner's fascinating autobiography for example, but technology might actually be the saviour of the book - serious or otherwise - and of children's (and adults') reading. At least this is what Amazon and Apple would like us to believe. When the publishers argue that "educational reform should not be limited to facilitating children's use of a computer", they overlook the potentially powerful symbiosis between technology and literature.
A recent book, assuming anyone's read it, has advanced the theory that the internet is changing the way we think. Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" has provoked a debate as it argues that the net has altered how we read and use our memories. Carr himself has said that "the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle". I can sympathise, when it comes to reading online. A mistake newspaper publishers are making in hoping for a mass migration to paid-for online newspapers is that they neglect the distractions of the internet. You can be reading something and suddenly the urge takes you elsewhere. Where do you want to go today? Why pay for something if you realise you're not going to read it?
Apple, with its iPad, offers a potentially whole brave new world for book reading. The iBooks application is but one part of the iPad, which, by coincidence or perhaps by design, an official video from the company described as feeling right "in the same way it just feels right to hold a book or magazine or newspaper". But the iPad is sold on the basis of its multiple applications; the distractions to go somewhere else, other than the book, are enormous. Amazon's Kindle is more straightforward. A promo video for the latest Kindle features a far from unattractive young lady sitting on a deckchair on a sunny beach, tucking into what may or may not be Jane Austen. Go anywhere, download anywhere, read anywhere is a seductive argument, but just how popular is it? Amazon claims millions of sales; an independent estimate suggests they are not as strong as the company would have them. Nevertheless, there may be more than just wishful thinking to Amazon's advertising which portrays the product's coolness for youngsters and for those who had never previously read a book.
But you still come back to the banality that the publishers were complaining about. The iPad or any computer hooked up to the internet doesn't overcome the greatest banalities of all - those sometimes perpetrated in the name of social networking via the likes of Facebook, recently described by the president of the Balearics' division of the Spanish consumers assocation FACUA as - and I am quoting him out of context - "the greatest evil that has been invented in the world". It isn't that (he was specifically referring to some more unpleasant aspects of Facebook), but it does contribute to a growing sense of abbreviated communication, part of a wider issue of a failure to concentrate, which is the product of what Carr is saying.
Mallorcan literary heritage is hardly a thing of international acclaim, but book reading locally has long been taken seriously. Whether what is being read is serious or not, if the publishers are concerned as to a decline in reading (and the statistics would bear this out), then they should perhaps be embracing, if they haven't already, the new technologies. Whether these really work though is still very much an unanswered question.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
How We Got Here: Mallorca and literature
Before the unexpected scorched earth policy a few days ago abruptly interrupted my train of thought, I had been reflecting - as you do while lying on the beach - on Great Works. My companion, literary-wise, was Jonathan Meades, a favourite of mine, as some of you will know, as he has been name-checked here more than once. Though not for the faint-hearted or for one disinclined to drag a dictionary and thesaurus to the beach, I had come across an old essay by Meades in which it was possible to decipher the names of great authors in the English language. It was these, the manufacturers of Great Works, which began to make me wonder.
Mallorca, and don't we just keep being reminded of it, proclaims a prodigious cultural heritage, one exaggerated often enough that we might start to believe it to be so. The poetry of the island might be said to support a literary culture, but it is parochial, a tradition continued via the pompous poetic introductions to most local fiesta brochures. And one says pompous, assuming anyone other than a local can understand them. Mallorcan poetry does not cross linguistic barriers. Indeed within the island's whole literary oeuvre, few names, let alone their works, have crossed into anything like a wider consciousness. And of these, one, Ramon Llull, was born almost 800 years ago. With one or two exceptions, such as Llorenç Villalonga who probably does deserve wider recognition for his twentieth-century novel on the decline of the Mallorcan nobility, one great author every millennium or so doesn't exactly constitute a rich tradition.
The literary heritage, and indeed other aspects of the arts culture of Mallorca, owes as much to non-Mallorcans as it does to those native to the island. But even here, it is a heritage by association as much as it is by work that is Mallorcan by content, if at all. As a refuge for the arty, the island, certain parts of it at any rate, is a matter of record, yet Mallorca has not lent itself to Great Works. And it was this absence that started to make me wonder.
Perhaps the two best known foreign literary figures with a clear Mallorcan identity are Robert Graves and George Sand. Graves, though he lived on the island on and off for nigh on sixty years, was too busy paving the way for Derek Jacobi to find international acclaim as Claudius to attempt a Mallorcan Great Work. Sand, holed up with Chopin in the shivering, tubercular hell of Valldemossa, gifted the world a winter in Mallorca, a book slavishly read by inquisitive Germans and largely ignored by everyone else. It is the very paucity of writing that has given rise to prominence being given to a minor thriller-ette by Agatha Christie and the absurd notion of invoking her as a promotional tool for Pollensa.
Into this barrenness has emerged pop literature. One hesitates to describe it as a movement; it is more of a crawl, with just a hint of the opportunist, a nod in the direction of Peter Mayle here, Ruth Rendell there, TV rights and a production unit somewhere else. If it has a cultural veneer, it is one polished to reflect the superficiality that can too easily be assigned to Mallorca. This is but one problem with the island and any pretence to the Great Work. The lack of depth is analogous with the lack of history. The joke with the cultural heritage is that Mallorca doesn't have a history, outside of its own insularity. In European terms it hardly merits a footnote. Nothing of note has ever happened in Mallorca or to it. Jaume I, you might argue, but he was a part of a process that climaxed in Granada 263 years later. The Civil War, you might say. Well, you might, but so you could about anywhere in Spain. Other than aspects of the period that would rather be forgotten, such as the Guernica-bombing Condor Legion being based in Puerto Pollensa, Mallorca's Civil War was not out of the ordinary, while Great Workers - Hemingway, Orwell - have done the subject of the war rather well.
But hang on. Go back a bit. Insularity. Mallorca may not have the potential for romanticised violence as other Mediterranean islands - Sicily and the Mafia, Corsica and its terrorism - but what it does have is an obstinate remoteness. Historical events may not lend themselves to a Great Work, but historical context most certainly does, and moulded into this context are the poets, artists, the polymath Llull, the families and the landed tradition.
Great Works are also great stories, of which the Spanish language has spawned translated crossovers with worldwide appreciation - Cervantes, Marquez for example. Villalonga wrote in both Spanish and Catalan; there is no reason why his epic "Bearn" should not be better known (it is available in English). Just as there is no reason why Mallorca shouldn't lend itself to current-day Great Works, in Catalan, Spanish or English. It is the nature of a land apart that holds the key, a land that today finds itself caught in the conflict of internalising, as symbolised by those fiesta poems, and a Europe, Spain even, it once had little to do with. That's the Great Work. Just one. How it got here.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Mallorca, and don't we just keep being reminded of it, proclaims a prodigious cultural heritage, one exaggerated often enough that we might start to believe it to be so. The poetry of the island might be said to support a literary culture, but it is parochial, a tradition continued via the pompous poetic introductions to most local fiesta brochures. And one says pompous, assuming anyone other than a local can understand them. Mallorcan poetry does not cross linguistic barriers. Indeed within the island's whole literary oeuvre, few names, let alone their works, have crossed into anything like a wider consciousness. And of these, one, Ramon Llull, was born almost 800 years ago. With one or two exceptions, such as Llorenç Villalonga who probably does deserve wider recognition for his twentieth-century novel on the decline of the Mallorcan nobility, one great author every millennium or so doesn't exactly constitute a rich tradition.
The literary heritage, and indeed other aspects of the arts culture of Mallorca, owes as much to non-Mallorcans as it does to those native to the island. But even here, it is a heritage by association as much as it is by work that is Mallorcan by content, if at all. As a refuge for the arty, the island, certain parts of it at any rate, is a matter of record, yet Mallorca has not lent itself to Great Works. And it was this absence that started to make me wonder.
Perhaps the two best known foreign literary figures with a clear Mallorcan identity are Robert Graves and George Sand. Graves, though he lived on the island on and off for nigh on sixty years, was too busy paving the way for Derek Jacobi to find international acclaim as Claudius to attempt a Mallorcan Great Work. Sand, holed up with Chopin in the shivering, tubercular hell of Valldemossa, gifted the world a winter in Mallorca, a book slavishly read by inquisitive Germans and largely ignored by everyone else. It is the very paucity of writing that has given rise to prominence being given to a minor thriller-ette by Agatha Christie and the absurd notion of invoking her as a promotional tool for Pollensa.
Into this barrenness has emerged pop literature. One hesitates to describe it as a movement; it is more of a crawl, with just a hint of the opportunist, a nod in the direction of Peter Mayle here, Ruth Rendell there, TV rights and a production unit somewhere else. If it has a cultural veneer, it is one polished to reflect the superficiality that can too easily be assigned to Mallorca. This is but one problem with the island and any pretence to the Great Work. The lack of depth is analogous with the lack of history. The joke with the cultural heritage is that Mallorca doesn't have a history, outside of its own insularity. In European terms it hardly merits a footnote. Nothing of note has ever happened in Mallorca or to it. Jaume I, you might argue, but he was a part of a process that climaxed in Granada 263 years later. The Civil War, you might say. Well, you might, but so you could about anywhere in Spain. Other than aspects of the period that would rather be forgotten, such as the Guernica-bombing Condor Legion being based in Puerto Pollensa, Mallorca's Civil War was not out of the ordinary, while Great Workers - Hemingway, Orwell - have done the subject of the war rather well.
But hang on. Go back a bit. Insularity. Mallorca may not have the potential for romanticised violence as other Mediterranean islands - Sicily and the Mafia, Corsica and its terrorism - but what it does have is an obstinate remoteness. Historical events may not lend themselves to a Great Work, but historical context most certainly does, and moulded into this context are the poets, artists, the polymath Llull, the families and the landed tradition.
Great Works are also great stories, of which the Spanish language has spawned translated crossovers with worldwide appreciation - Cervantes, Marquez for example. Villalonga wrote in both Spanish and Catalan; there is no reason why his epic "Bearn" should not be better known (it is available in English). Just as there is no reason why Mallorca shouldn't lend itself to current-day Great Works, in Catalan, Spanish or English. It is the nature of a land apart that holds the key, a land that today finds itself caught in the conflict of internalising, as symbolised by those fiesta poems, and a Europe, Spain even, it once had little to do with. That's the Great Work. Just one. How it got here.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Time Won't Give Me Time
A happy event - Frederick and Emmi have a baby girl called Isabel. Bistro Bell in Alcúdia, that was La Sala, may no longer have the wail of Nanouk, but it can now anticipate another form of cry. I mention this by way of introduction to ... Firstly, Frederick was full of praise for Inca Hospital, commenting that concepts of service do seem to be thriving in some sectors of Mallorcan life. Secondly, I had stopped by the bistro to collect something. It was a book. It had been left there by one of my email correspondents - Charles - to whom I am very grateful. It was, and is, "Beloved Majorcans" by Guy de Forestier, some of you might know it. Published in 1995, the book is one of those rare insights into Mallorca, one that does not take as its raison d'être a brochure approach of the island, typified, as I pointed out the other day, by Thomsonisms that can give us something as pretentious as the "a hop, skip and a jump away from the shimmering sands of Muro beach" (21 June). This is not Mallorca through rose-tinted, glass-bottomed boat but nor is it Mallorca to hell and back. It is non-pompous, it is culturally, historically and linguistically literate and it is coloured with the ease of a journalistic style and a wit that is all too absent from mostly anything one reads about the island. It is also authored pseudonymously. The guy is not Guy. The author is in fact Carlos García-Delgado, born a Catalan but adopted by Mallorca. Though more or less native, the book - in translation at any rate - feels something other than a work by a Mallorcan (Catalan). It is though an insider has looked in from the outside, informed by that insider status.
As I scanned through the book for the first time, I was struck by certain coincidences to pieces have appeared in this blog over the now years. The coincidence of Chapter 8 - "The Concept Of Time" and Chapter 9 - "Buying And Selling" (doing business if you like). When, for example, I had spoken in the past about the non-existence or flexibility of time and indifference/ambivalence towards time, it hadn't necessarily occurred to me that someone else would have been there before. To quote: "What is certain is that in Majorca - and the sooner you realize this the better - minutes don't have sixty seconds, any more than days have twenty-four hours". Mañana may be a Spanish concept of non-time, but the Mallorcans have made of it a high art of abstraction.
The advice for those coming to live in Mallorca is such that I wonder to what degree those from northern Europe in particular can ever go native. Much of what García-Delgado says will be familiar to expats, some of whom will claim to have indeed gone native in adapting to, for instance, non-time if I can call it that. But I doubt them when they protest so. I also wonder whether, 13 years on from publication, the book still holds true. In many respects it does, but in others? Take Frederick and Inca Hospital. Service, if one follows García-Delgado's thesis, should hold no place in Mallorcan society, yet it does. But if anyone wants to experience, first-hand, "the slow pace at which things are done here - be forewarned if you have to go shopping, do business or deal with bureaucracy", then you can test and prove the thesis in respect especially of bureaucracy. Go to the office for foreign affairs in Palma, stand in the boiling sun or the rain in the queue to wait to get in, and then spend three hours waiting to get that residency certificate. I had been inclined to think of this as indifference or lack of respect; it isn't, or well it is, indifference at any rate. Because that time spent is not time; it is neutral, it is indifferent.
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Tears For Fears (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1OduoZAUeM). Today's title - pretty easy, but think androgyny if a clue is needed.
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
As I scanned through the book for the first time, I was struck by certain coincidences to pieces have appeared in this blog over the now years. The coincidence of Chapter 8 - "The Concept Of Time" and Chapter 9 - "Buying And Selling" (doing business if you like). When, for example, I had spoken in the past about the non-existence or flexibility of time and indifference/ambivalence towards time, it hadn't necessarily occurred to me that someone else would have been there before. To quote: "What is certain is that in Majorca - and the sooner you realize this the better - minutes don't have sixty seconds, any more than days have twenty-four hours". Mañana may be a Spanish concept of non-time, but the Mallorcans have made of it a high art of abstraction.
The advice for those coming to live in Mallorca is such that I wonder to what degree those from northern Europe in particular can ever go native. Much of what García-Delgado says will be familiar to expats, some of whom will claim to have indeed gone native in adapting to, for instance, non-time if I can call it that. But I doubt them when they protest so. I also wonder whether, 13 years on from publication, the book still holds true. In many respects it does, but in others? Take Frederick and Inca Hospital. Service, if one follows García-Delgado's thesis, should hold no place in Mallorcan society, yet it does. But if anyone wants to experience, first-hand, "the slow pace at which things are done here - be forewarned if you have to go shopping, do business or deal with bureaucracy", then you can test and prove the thesis in respect especially of bureaucracy. Go to the office for foreign affairs in Palma, stand in the boiling sun or the rain in the queue to wait to get in, and then spend three hours waiting to get that residency certificate. I had been inclined to think of this as indifference or lack of respect; it isn't, or well it is, indifference at any rate. Because that time spent is not time; it is neutral, it is indifferent.
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Tears For Fears (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1OduoZAUeM). Today's title - pretty easy, but think androgyny if a clue is needed.
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
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