Love, precariousness and other forms of anxiety: women who talk and walk through Barcelona today

A middle-aged woman who can’t cope between work obligations and all the household obligations. Too bad that the protagonist of the graphic novel is doing well Today, of the Argentine Agustina Guerrero. She, like the author, has lived in Barcelona for more than 20 years. She walks lost among the people until one day, on her way to work, she says enough. His effort is a typically contemporary urban experience. Let’s call it a gender variant of stress. It is an experience that adapts and declines depending on the circumstances. In a specific place in the city, the protagonist of Today She feels trapped because the connection between her intimate anguish and the architecture intensifies this feeling. It happens in one of the icons of the new cultural Barcelona, in the street that crosses the Auditorium.

After the first municipal elections after the dictatorship, progressive councils were key actors in tangible democratization at the local level. As an attempt at dignity through urban planning, one of the mottos of Barcelona’s first socialist city councils was the monumentalization of the suburbs. Popular neighborhoods, post-industrial areas. The classicist Teatre Nacional de Catalunya was built near the Plaza de las Glorias and right next to it the rationalist L’Auditori by Rafael Moneo. In a shot from above we see the protagonist of Today She is struck by dismay and imagines climbing the walls, reaching the cornice of the building and from there looking at the city as a way to regain freedom. Guerrero portrays her from behind and the Sagrada Familia stands out in the landscape she contemplates.

When she leaves the office, freed, she decides to rediscover the city, to look for signs that will allow her to rediscover herself. One of the first neighborhoods he passes through is Poble Sec. An old lady explains to him that this public fountain was a conquest of the neighborhood struggle, then he approaches a public park, takes a swing and next to him an older man hums “Today could be a great day”, by Joan Manuel Serrat. Internalizing the lyrics of the song, walking around Barcelona, is a fable about finding happiness in the city. It’s a beautiful story, another of the stories of Barcelona written by women.

The Barcelona novel: a mythological animal

“Is Barcelona a well-told literary city?” Javier Rodríguez Marcos asked Francisco Casavella when he published the first episode of Watusi Day. Casavella didn’t hesitate: “Even too much telling, for being so small. But with good results.” It was a sentence that closed an ancient dispute that has plagued literature on Barcelona for a hundred years. In that period Sergi Pàmies, with total irony, published a book of short stories entitled The great novel of Barcelona. Miqui Otero, responding in another interview after the publication of the splendid Simon (2021), used more irony to escape that cliché: “The Barcelona novel does not exist, it is a mythological animal”.

Books like Barcelona and its writers, by Maria Àngels Cabré. For two reasons. Because it presents 70 authors whose “field of action” was the city and who in many cases had not been taken into consideration. And, above all, because its data rewrites the map of Barcelona.

a movie by the writer Víctor Català, published in 1926, inaugurates the novelists’ walks through the skin of the city

When Barcelona was designated guest of honor of the Guadalajara FIL, one of the institutional objectives was to strengthen the translation of books into Spanish with the Catalan capital at the center of the plot. The operation was piloted by the Institut Ramon Llull. Thus, a novel published in installments a century ago can now be read in Spanish for the first time: a movie, by Víctor Català—pseudonym of Caterina Albert, founder of contemporary Catalan fiction—. It is the work that inaugurates the cycle of writers’ walks through the skin of the city.

The arrival of Nonat Ventura, a character with a divided identity, is the pretext to discover Barcelona from his resentful gaze. A very different vision is that of Colometa de diamond square (1962), written by Mercè Rodoreda in exile, or the one that sees a Barcelona prisoner of post-war ghosts, where Andrea de Nothing (1945) by Carmen Laforet goes through the rite of passage of learning to deceive. The story that passes from gray to democratic Barcelona is the one captured by Montserrat Roig Cherry time (1977), selected by Babelia as one of the 50 best books of the last half century.

The conclusion is obvious and not obvious: the city seen through the eyes of women constitutes a fundamental vector of the literary construction of Barcelona.

Precariousness counts

The democratic construction of Barcelona sought to rehabilitate Chinatown, monumentalize the suburbs and transform the post-industrial city into a city of services. The Olympic Games enabled large-scale urban intervention and created a myth linked to the days of the End of History. The success had a very long hangover.

At the end of the 2000s, an ideological discourse denouncing the takeover of the city by neoliberalism began to take shape. The suspicion became reality with the outbreak of the economic crisis. How then to count the city?

The writers Mercè Ibarz, Llucia Ramis and Anna Pacheco, KIKE RINCÓN / PERE VIRGILI (CCCB) / MASSIMILIANO MINOCRI

In these circumstances, a new emblematic character began to be created in Barcelona’s literature. A victim of the system who tells it without victimization. It’s the opposite of the elegant fairy tale it is. Vicky Cristina Barcellona. If the contemporary classic had been Pijoaparte by Juan Marsé, the new subject was the young woman who experiences the city with hostility or the woman who feels progressively precarious or declassed, themes discussed in the new essay by Noelia Ramírez, who also describes her journey from the suburbs to the center of the city.

The new subject of the Barcelona novel was the young woman who experiences the city with hostility or the woman who feels progressively precarious or declassed.

It is the story of the first novels by Llucia Ramis, Anna Pacheco and Andrea Genovart: Things that happen in Barcelona when you are thirty (2008), Nice, clean lists (2019) e Consume preferably (2023). Ramis recalls how tradition served him in the literary construction of his Barcelona. “I had ways to write it in my head: the streets, the squares and the people of Rodoreda and Laforet, but also of Pàmies and Monzó”. Genovart also took on that legacy to build his narrative. “As a reader I was interested in the humor and the banal and mediocre characters of Pàmies, Monzó or the sarcastic and lucid acidity of Casavella”.

In these three novels their protagonists clash in various ways with a city that does not welcome but rather expels or becomes an unpleasant companion. For them, the problem of housing, low wages or tension between classes make it difficult for these women who go around building a peaceful horizon of maturity.

It’s not a very different experience from the one experienced by the protagonist of thenext time I see you I’ll kill youby the Chilean Paulina Flores, or what the Catalan playwright of Argentine origins Victòria Szpunberg proposes in The categorical imperative (2024), just performed in Madrid and winner of the National Prize for Dramatic Literature. The experience of the city of its protagonists is inseparable from the anguish for the home and for the city that it expels.

Walk with love on the road

The opening scene of Nothing It is Andrea’s arrival at the Barcelona train station. His story is that of the discovery of young people in the moral and material misery of the post-war period. The opening scene of the excellent a girl in the city It’s similar. Mercè Ibarz arrived by bus, it’s true, and the city of the early Seventies was not that of the black Forties, but she too, walking, going to the cinema, changing apartments, would become a girl in the city.

This memory just published it is one of the most beautiful literary homages that have been written about Barcelona. What gives rise to this fully mature writing is the mourning for the death of L., her husband. Of the physical loss, the writer remembers and thinks back to her youthful experience, the formation of her intimacy through friendship and the building of a relationship. In this exercise of remembrance, life and the city come together to tell a love story for the man you love and the city that welcomed you, Barcelona, to be who you are. “Cities are dreams, and being 20 years old then was also this, dreaming of them with your eyes awake and with your eyes closed.”