Europa!, the series organized by the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona between September 27 and 30 within the framework of the Spanish presidency of the Council of Europe, has had philosophers, thinkers, writers, historians, editors and political scientists debating on the Old Continent when sixty years have passed since the founding of the European Union. Could there be a worse time to organize something like this? Generalized rise of the extreme right, migratory crisis, still immersed in post-pandemic emotional and economic depression, unsurmounted Brexit arrogance...
In conversation with the journalist and writer Jordi Amat, the Italian historian Enzo Traverso expressed his embarrassment at his country's rejection of immigrants and regretted that the war in Ukraine was managed by Turkey, the United States and China instead of the EU. “Europe has worked by offering young people of the Easy Jet generation the possibility of making friends by traveling cheap at a level that was impossible when I was their age, but for the rest it has been building itself as a neoliberal state of exception, its government is not democratic "Germany sets the rules," he lamented.
As a closing, an exceptional “infiltrator”, the South African Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee, who under the heading Europe and the Outside World spoke with the American editor and professor Valérie Miles as a foreigner who is knowledgeable and in love with European literature.
Auditorium with tickets sold out. Lots of youth (there is hope!). And an illustrative anecdote: a chorus of journalists, writers and editors have even given up attending an Antònia Font concert in Girona to listen to the maestro, who we know does not lavish anything in public and is allergic to interviews. Coetzee exudes the sobriety and rigor that characterize him, a certain air of a Protestant pastor. He speaks in whispers, but with a sweet timbre, and begins by addressing the audience – which will always remain in a deathly silence that leads one to think of that awe inspired by the teachers of yesteryear – in Spanish, “limited, I'm sorry.” When switching to English, he warns that he hopes not to engage in opinions not supported by good arguments, much less in the expression of feelings. Both risks seem unlikely from the moment in which both he and his interlocutor read the texts they have prepared, which gives a certain rigidity to the act that is compensated by an exposition of elaborate ideas and a clear thematic order.
Over the course of ninety minutes, the author of Disgrace, who confesses to being an outsider from Europe, but at the same time someone closely linked to it, comments that, for him, writing is above all a practical and intuitive process, of trial and error. , “something closer to cooking a dish than to philosophizing.” A good part of his intervention is dedicated to his latest novel, The Pole, published first in Spanish translation, distributed primarily in Latin America, which has Barcelona as one of its locations and which asked its potential foreign publishers to have it translated from Spanish and not English (Japan, France and Poland did not pass through the hoop). “I don't feel English is my language,” he will declare, giving majestic praise to translators – “by putting words on paper, I am aware of the problems I can put them in and I manage to avoid things.”
Chopin, Cervantes, Robert Musil, Flaubert, Robert Walser, will parade through his conference, which will conclude with a call so that we do not forget the Russian intelligentsia that has been fighting against the country's oppressors since the 19th century. Final surprise: the alleged apex of the distant and antisocial writer stayed for half an hour signing books.
