A Summer In Mallorca: Heat and novels

According to one particular website, the highest temperature ever recorded in Spain was in Murcia on 29 July 1876. It was 47.8C. After this is another high in Murcia, a slightly lower 47.2C on 4 July 1994. Then come Badajoz in Extremadura on 26 June 1864 with 47C and three positively shivering recordings of only 46.6C at Moron de la Frontera (Seville) on 19 July 1967 and on 23 July 1995 in both Cordoba and Seville. Palma, which for the purposes of these records appears to mean the whole of the Balearics, is quite a long way off the pace: 40.6C at Son Sant Joan airport on 30 July 1983.

You do have to be careful with these records though. The Murcia 1876 temperature is considered unreliable as indeed are ones which have been pretty well discarded from meteorological history - the 51C and 50C of Seville in 1876 and 1881. The Murcia 1994 temperature, however, is reliable. Officially, it is the highest temperature ever recorded: 116.9 in old Fahrenheit money. It is important in the context of Mallorca's weather, too. At the time of that particular ultra-heatwave, the highest temperature in Mallorca was registered, and it was 44.2C in Muro: the Palma high eleven years before didn't even come close.

When the temperatures get as high as they do, though not as high as 1994, they are treated as unusual events and so evidence of something or other. They may indeed be evidence of something or other, or they may just be relatively common. Those unreliable highs back in the nineteenth century will have had some basis in meteorological fact and they would have doubtless coincided with exceptionally high temperatures in Mallorca, though what these might have been is not possible to say as there are no records.

As I write this, the thermometer not far away inland is - according to AEMET - nudging the 40 mark. It nudged it and passed it three years ago at roughly the same time of year. Evidence of something or other. Which may just be that this summer will bear a great deal of similarity to that of 2003: Spain's hottest in terms of duration if not specific records. For almost three months, nighttime temperatures didn't fall below 20C, while daytime highs were not under 30C. If this summer does turn out to be a virtual mirror of 2003, then expect an almighty great storm as 31 August becomes 1 September, which is what happened that year.

It would be nice, mainly because I have a like of unearthing less than well known anniversaries, to be able to apply an anniversary to this summer's weather, but there isn't one which suggests itself. Instead, and because the high temperatures will inspire some to wax lyrically or more likely in clichéd terms, there is a summer literary anniversary which should be remembered. The year in question was forty years ago, so 1975. It was the year when a novel appeared entitled "A Summer in Mallorca". Or more accurately, it was "Un estiu a Mallorca", as its author was Majorcan, and his name was Llorenç Villalonga.

For the uninitiated, Villalonga is generally regarded as Mallorca's greatest novelist. As such, and because he was mightily influenced by the likes of Proust, he wasn't the sort to be inclined to pay overly much attention to the accuracies or otherwise of weather records (which had, by the time he wrote the novel, been systematically kept for some years by then). Instead, he devoted an entire novel - his last - to what was in essence an ironic refuting of George Sand's "A Winter in Mallorca", or "Un hiver à Majorque", given that she was French.

It's a curious novel in which Sand herself is referred to and blended with an of-the-times female writer, a character called Sílvia Ocampo, whose resemblance to the real Sílvina Ocampo (note the distinguishing "n") is only passing, other than that the character is a writer.

Villalonga based his novel forty years before he wrote it, and so the Mallorca of his summer wasn't vastly different to how it would have been had Sand spent a summer rather than a winter in Mallorca: a hundred years hadn't really changed Mallorca fundamentally.

It would have been more instructive, for those of us in contemporary tourism times, had the novel been based in 1975, but then it couldn't have been because in effect Villalonga was placing Sand in 1935, a time when more aristocratic women were still to the fore, which wasn't the case by 1975. So his summer in Mallorca is only partially (very partially) a reflection of a Mallorcan summer as it now is, and so, as with other aspects of modern Mallorca, there is a great work about the summer waiting to be written. Until such time, we'll have to content ourselves with descriptions of how hot it is.

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.

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.

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.