Two looks at the Barcelona of the sixties

In every corner of a city, behind every doorway, on the other side of the blinds of a shop, we can find a story, a life.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
04 June 2022 Saturday 21:52
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Two looks at the Barcelona of the sixties

In every corner of a city, behind every doorway, on the other side of the blinds of a shop, we can find a story, a life. The cities, their streets and their walls are full of stories, changes, secrets and silences. Barcelona is no exception. Their neighborhoods have been transforming, they have breathed the changes that boiled inside people, but also those that came from outside. Chinatown, La Mina, the changes it underwent to become an Olympic city...

Among the streets of the city map, there are those who want to keep up with the pace of change and there are those who would prefer that nothing move from place, that everything be as before. This clash, this desire to retain time, maintain the order of the past while the world continues to advance, is one of the driving forces that we find in the latest novels by Laura Anguera and Pilar Eyre, two works that propose two different ways of looking at Barcelona, ​​one time, and the figure of women in a time of change.

For its part, in Pilar Eyre's (Barcelona, ​​1951) latest novel, When We Were Yesterday, we explore a more limited period of time, from Barcelona in the sixties to pre-Olympic Barcelona, ​​and we do so hand in hand with a family, especially Carmen and her daughter Silvia, two completely different women, but who struggle, each in her own way, to find her place in the world. A world that is marked by class differences, by the privileges of some and the struggle of others, but also by those who dressed as revolutionaries or progressives without really being, without understanding what it meant to truly suffer fear, poverty or the pain of loss.

Nobody told me about you , the second novel by Laura Anguera (Barcelona, ​​1966) takes us on an intimate and historical journey in the form of a retrospective: from present-day Barcelona we travel to Barcelona in the sixties, to S'Agaró and to other places of the Catalan coast; we discover the visits of movie stars and the musical explosion, the growth of newspapers and publishers or the opening of mythical premises of a city that wanted to open up to the world. And we do it hand in hand with Carolina and a book that unleashes all the questions, a small volume by Simone de Beauvoir, hidden in the library of her father's house, which will lead her to reopen an old wound: the disappearance of her mother, when she was very little, and the great emptiness that has always accompanied her since then.

Both authors have opted for female characters to carry the weight of the plot and the changes. It is through his eyes that we see the political revolution, the interest in transforming things. And it is also through her eyes that we contemplate the wild machismo that prevailed at the time and everything that women had to put up with to get respect, the right to have their own voice.

Laura Anguera does it through the character of Carolina, but above all to the generation before and after: her missing mother, Elena, and her rebellious daughter, Ariana. The desire to be authentic, not to have to follow the rules, to be free, to be able to think and feel for themselves runs up against what others will say, the rigidity of the family, of a husband who controls you, of a mother or a father who decide for you. For her part, Pilar Eyre offers us a more subtle process in the skin of Carmen, Silvia's mother, since she will be the one who will have to understand the changes, adapting to them, while Silvia looks for a way to be herself without find her.

Two novels that have coincided in time and that have explored the same period of a Barcelona that continues to change, although sometimes you can still find spaces among its streets that arouse nostalgia and make you remember what is no longer.