A city that advances thanks to pyrotechnics, tours de force, big explosions, great events that make it a world showcase. This was the case at the Universal Exhibition of 1888 and at the International Exhibition of 1929, the two great axes on which the action of the novel 'La ciudad de los prodigios', by Eduardo Mendoza, published in 1986, just five months before, pivoted. of the proclamation of the Catalan capital as the venue for the 1992 Olympic Games, an event that would work with the same galvanizing and exciting objective as the exhibitions in the novel and whose spirit would be repeated -in a more debatable way- in the Fòrum de les Cultures from 2004.
Together with the roguish businessman Onofre Bouvila, the great protagonist of 'La ciudad de los prodigios' is the city, in all its splendor and misery. The readers carried out an enormous process of identification between the city that was reinventing itself in the eighties with the Olympic transformation and the one described in this story on horseback between the 19th and 20th centuries. The city as a benign monster in full expansion, at which it is impossible to stop looking even if we ignore the consequences of its deployment. "Yes, that's how we are," said the locals. And foreigners fell in awe of the drive, dynamism and fun of a story that invited them to visit the place. More than a historical novel to use, it is a reconstruction of collective psychology, of the multiform and contradictory identity of a community made up of the sum of its inhabitants throughout time and in which, of course, they always receive the same.
There was a desire, in those eighties, to stop referring to the long Francoist stain, and evoke a time when the myth of progress seemed valid, with its scientific, technical and economic development and growth -for some, even moral-, all this filtered by the essential mocking gaze of the narrator. It is no coincidence that Eduardo Mendoza was chosen to be the town crier at the Mercè festivities in 1987. As Sergio Vila-Sanjuán recalls in the prologue of one of the latest editions of the novel, the author distanced himself, in some interviews, from the official interpretation of his book: “For me, 'The City of Prodigies' was actually the city of deceit, not the city of well-done public works. It was a city that wanted to move from backwardness to modernity and was dazzled by all the wonders of that time: electricity, the telephone…”
After some references to the remote past of Barcelona (with Hannibal's elephants drinking from the waters of the Besòs), the action begins in the moments before the opening of the 1888 Universal Exhibition in Barcelona, which was held in the Ciutadella Park , and for which the still existing Arc de Triomphe was erected, among others. It was the 'annus mirabilis' of the city even though the municipality fell into debt and suffered greatly demanding more financial support from Madrid (the ridiculous expedition of Catalan great men to obtain the support of the minister was priceless).
Onofre Bouvila, the protagonist, begins his journey from the lowest strata of the popular classes, coming from rural Catalonia, and, little by little, through successive businesses - which include hiring boys to steal products from the warehouse of the Exhibition of 1888-, he ascended social steps until he became one of the richest men in Barcelona. Anarchist groups, business thugs, political struggles, refined bourgeois tastes or various sentimental entanglements take place in the plot.
Just as E.L. Doctorow had done with the New York Exhibition in 'The World's Fair', published the previous year, Mendoza (with more humor and bad milk, yes, than the American) portrays the motley set of human types that converge around a great event (in his case, two), with digressions and secondary stories that refer to serial novels. Among the real characters, the mayor Francesc Rius i Taulet, Primo de Rivera, the Empress Sissi, Picasso, Rasputin or Mata Hari herself.
Mendoza does acknowledge having been influenced by 'Ragtime' (1975) by E.L. Doctorow, by '1876' (1976) by Gore Vidal (both set in New York) and by 'The Great Train Robbery' (1975) by Michael Crichton What happens in London. In all three he found "useful keys" to address the issue of "cities in transformation", as Llàtzer Moix confessed to his biographer in 'Mundo Mendoza'. During the years in which he wrote his most important work, Mendoza also traveled from one city in the world to another, due to his work as an international interpreter, which sharpened his gaze when he returned to Barcelona. His sister Cristina also helped him by providing him access to the Library of the Museu d'Art Modern and to the complete collection of the official newspaper of the 1888 Universal Exhibition.
There are authors who focus on a neighborhood or a very specific historical period. Mendoza, on the other hand, deals with the entire city and follows it over a period of several decades, almost half a century (in a draft or initial idea, it was even a hundred years), with conflicts that are still projected in the present. , such as access to housing or abuses by elites. Among the most remarkable scenarios, the two fairgrounds, the Ciutadella park and the Montjuïc fairgrounds, including Poble Espanyol, as well as Passeig de Gràcia, which housed the houses of the great bourgeoisie, Barceloneta, the Horta labyrinth , the Palau de la Música, Via Laietana...
The book has given rise to a film by Mario Camus in 1999, a comic by Claudio Stassi in 2020 and there is a project for a television series. Bernard Pivot said that "Barcelona has, thanks to this novel, a literary equivalent to Gaudí's genius". Maruja Torres wrote in Diario 16 that the book "is for a Barcelonan the same as One Hundred Years of Solitude for a Colombian." A little fed up with all the added meaning that his work was acquiring, Mendoza regretted on the one hand having become "the writer of Barcelona", although on the other he admitted that "it would be ungrateful for me to complain".
