In 2010, Isabel Obiols, who at that time was the editor of La Magrana, had the idea of recovering my book La ciutat interrompuda (2001) about the transition from counterculture to post-Olympic Barcelona. We had to update it. There were so many authors, so many books and new points of view that what should have been a note turned into a long essay in which, unlike the original book, there were no distinct period styles: everything happened simultaneously, very mixed: great diatribes and tremendous praise, violin concertos and machine gun bursts. The conclusions are used for the literature on Barcelona that has been published in the last four or five years. On the one hand, a narrative of the Barcelona Model has been created that did not exist before 2001. Barcelona has become a product and has generated novels in which literature and the city are also products.
Thematic novels: Enric Calpena talks about Joan Gamper and the origins of Barça in The first captain (Editions 62, 2020), Pilar Rahola by Bernard Hilda and Barcelona in the years of the Second World War in L'espia del Ritz (Columna, 2021), Alfred Bosch on the construction of the Sagrada Familia in The temple of the poor (Columna, 2022). However, the main volume consists of critical novels. There is a discomfort shared by very diverse writers: from Julià de Jòdar to Llucia Ramis and from Borja Bagunyà to Marina Espasa. Julià de Jòdar is dialectical, very bitter. He has published a great novel about the 1929 exhibition, The Vulnerables (Comanegra, 2018).
Many critical books pose alternative realities: a city transfigured by the imagination. At a certain moment, apocalyptic stories became fashionable: from David Castillo in Barcelona no existeix (Empúries, 2014) to Valentí Puig in Barcelona 2101 (Proa, 2018). Barcelona has no remedy: we only have isolation, satire and tantrums. We could ask young critics: "If you don't like Barcelona so much, why do you stay?"
In recent years, a series of books starring gentlemen and ladies who are leaving have been published. In Mamut by Eva Baltasar (Club Editor, 2022), which has a Barcelona part, before the protagonist settles in the countryside, we find one of the best images of Barcelona in recent years: the protagonist lives in an apartment next to the zoo, Baltasar describes in a very suggestive way the call of the jungle, which is the howls of the beasts in their cages.
There is fatigue, it seems that the wound does not ooze as much and people have lost the will to dig into it. The two novels by Adrià Pujol, Mister Folch (Empúries, 2019) and The places where Jonàs slept (Empúries, 2021), provide a new vision of the city, a step beyond Picadura de Barcelona (Edicions Sidillà, 2014), which is a fundamental book. In The places where Jonàs has slept, he writes a very funny scene set in El Mobile. That is to say that Pujol incorporates an element of contemporary reality and that gives it an anthropological dimension: it is a novel about identities based on the idea of video game avatars. In Els angles morts Borja Bagunyà (Periscopi, 2022) describes the doubts and failures of people in their forties. Although the most powerful scene does not take place in Barcelona but in a guard in can Ruti.
Another possible way is the fragmentary observation: Tina Vallès in El senyor Palomar in Barcelona (Anagrama, 2021). These last few days we have witnessed the return of Lluís-Anton Baulenas, an author who has written a lot about Barcelona, between a truculent world of his own and the novel Sapiens. This time it is a book about real estate speculation, Seré el teu mirall (Comanegra, 2023). While Roser Caminals in Before and After (Editions 62, 2023), Eduard Márquez in 1969 (The Other, 2022) and Gemma Ruiz Palà in Les nostres mares (Proa, 2023) project a retrospective look at the post-war city and the sixties
Barcelona’s best novel is also retrospective: Entre l’infern i la glòria by Àlvar Valls (Editions of 1984, 2020) which, based on the Verdaguer case, draws a portrait of Catalan society that, valid for today,
