Getting on the subway, observing and inventing lives is one of the favorite pastimes of many writers, like Guadalupe Nettel. The everyday scenes that occur there are likely to appear in future stories and, with almost all probability, more than one will be portrayed with their gaze fixed on a mobile phone. An image that no one could have imagined in the seventies, when the Internet did not yet exist. How have we gotten here and what has happened these years? asks Francesc Bracero in his book Bicycles for the Mind (Peninsula), which he presented on Tuesday at the Bernat bookstore in Barcelona together with the director of Applesfera, Pedro Aznar.
It is no coincidence that the technology-savvy journalist from La Vanguardia chose that place as a meeting point with readers, since it was in those four walls where the project began to take shape. There he met for the first time with Ramón Perelló, “who gave me some invaluable advice to start this book,” and with the editor of Peninsula, Oriol Alcorta. The bookstore responded to this love story with a room with no free seats, occupied by both technological experts and users who barely know their way around but who wanted to give the virtual world a chance. “It is a book designed for all audiences. I don't get into too many technicalities and it is designed so that everyone understands it. This is an exercise that I do every day in the diary,” said Bracero.
In the pages of what is his first book, the journalist told the most restless present that "you will not find a biography of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but rather I try to explain the transition from analog to digital life" and that, to For this reason, it is necessary to talk about characters like Hedy Lamarr, the inventor of Wi-Fi, who “was never taken seriously because she was too beautiful,” or the mathematician Claude Shannon, “whom I would have loved to interview.”
Bracero not only talked about the past, but about everything that is to come, such as the Vision Pro (a mixed reality device marketed by Apple) or artificial intelligence, “a chapter that is exploding now but that has yet to be written.” What is clear is that, if used correctly, technology offers a range of advantages, including communicating with someone who is thousands of kilometers away. This is one of the needs felt by Rosalía, the protagonist of Ucraïna, mon amour (Empúries), the new book by Carles Torner. She is about a translator who is forced to return to Barcelona after the Russian military invasion of Ukraine and who misses all the life she leaves behind.
Its author spoke about it on Monday at La Central on Mallorca Street together with the Slovenian philologist and translator Simona Škrabec and the history professor Josep Maria Lluró. The writer knew that her protagonist well deserved a book. So much so, that he has made him return to the novel 26 years later. A wait that its readers have endured impatiently, who filled the terrace of the bookstore ten minutes before the event began, and among whom was the writer Jordi Pàmias.
During the event, Torner reflected on how we would have to present Ukraine and Ukrainians to the world. Given the lack of response, he offered the one given to him by the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrujovich during an event at the Center de Cultura Contemporània of Barcelona (CCCB) on the occasion of the beginning of the invasion: let's cry together. “And with this book I propose that we cry together, because that is what the protagonist does. A cry of rage and pain that I try to capture and communicate with my writing.”
The week did not end with tears, but with poems by Francesc Bombí-Vilaseca. The La Vanguardia journalist has just published Febre amb gel (Editorial Fonoll), which he wrote in 2000 in Catalan, Spanish and English and which he rescues after letting it rest, like good wine. Some poems have evolved over the years. And they all have in common that they are born from the need to flow. “It came out like that to me at the time. “He wrote and couldn't stop,” he admits. And that is what both he and his companion, the writer and screenwriter Pep Blay, did in the Calders bookstore on Thursday. Interpret, recite, flow and, above all, have a good time and make the audience enjoy. An exercise that Bombí has been doing since he was a child but that he puts on paper for the first time. “I had not published poems before because I recited them and they already reached an audience.” There is always a first time and yours is being surrounded by friends.
