Snippet: Manu Valentín’s Yiddish Barcelona [non-fiction]

Manu Valentín, Voces caídas del cielo. Historia del exilio judío en Barcelona, 1881-1954 [Voices fallen from the sky: the history of the Jewish exile in Barcelona, 1881-1954], 2019, 270 p.

publisher’s summary:

Voces caídas del cielo pretends to fill a notable vaccuum left by Spanish historiography and to weave the thread of the collective memory of a community of Jewish exiles who struggled to establish themselves in the city of Barcelona with hardly any support. Based on a vast body of documentation, a lot of it unpublished (corresponding to archives that hadn’t been consulted before), sources that dealt with the crisis of the Jewish exiles in different moments, and interviews with the refugees and their descendents, the historian Manu Valentín manages to rescue the protagonists’ memory and raises their personal experiences to the level of historical events.

This book also assumes as a responsability promoting the debate on topics seldom touched in the country’s history, such as the covert persecution of Jews in the contemporary ear (rebuked by different governments as “undesirable elements”). It is definitely necessary to approach antisemitism in Spain to question the idea that Jewish refugees were helped and their integration promoted.

Plàcid Garcia-Planas, in his column that presents the book, talks about a few thousand Jewish refugees that arrived in the 1930s; and that there came even more to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on the side of the Republic (Naftali Botwin Company, Wikipedia).

SOURCE: Comanegra (publisher); Plàcid Garcia-Planas’ column “Cabaret Voltaire” in La Vanguardia, Nov. 16, 2019, p. 10 [printed edition]

Snippet: Prado museum turns 200 [article link, not literary]

The story comes from Deutsche Welle [English], Nov. 19, 2019.

 

Snippet: Geschwister-Scholl-Preis 2019 to Ahmet Altan [not Iberian]

The Geschwister-Scholl-Preis 2019, a literary award endowed with 10,000 € [Wikipedia], has been awarded to a representative of Ahmet Altan for the book Ich werde die Welt nie wiedersehen [I’ll never see the world again].

The prize winner, Ahmet Altan [Wikipedia] has been imprisoned in Turkey since 2016; more on the case can be read at the international writers association PEN website [though it needs updating].

SOURCE: Deutsche Welle, Nov. 25, 2019 [German]

Snippet: Mañas’ “Last binge”

José Ángel Mañas, La última juerga [The last binge], 2019, 392 p.

Ateneo de Sevilla novel prize 2019

publisher’s summary:

They were hardly in their twenties then: a group of friends that met in a bar called “Kronen” and consumed youth on the base of se*, alcohol and drugs. In some occasions they flirted with death, and somebody even got hurt by this flirting. A lot of time has passed; 25 years to be exact. Now they work and do quite well; some of them got married and have kids. Hardly anyone of them takes drugs, and the binge drinking has turned into oenology. When Carlos gets a life-shattering piece of news, he feels the necessity of meeting his friend Pedro again, whom he hasn’t seen in years. Maybe it will only be a reunion to remember some moments of the past, or it could be the beginning of the last binge.

 

To a lot of middle-aged Spanish readers (Generation X) Mañas is known for his 1994 novel Historias del Kronen [Kronen stories].

From the Wikipedia article:

The novel is set in Madrid during July 1992. Carlos is the book’s main protagonist, a young university student just turned 21 and who is described as a “daddy’s boy,” egocentric and lacking empathy, whose existence is dominated by alcohol, drugs and se*. He regularly meets his friends at the Kronen beerhouse, his preferred bar, fictitious, and located in the novel close to the Francisco Silvela street in Madrid. He is described as a sociopath. Carlos experiences a progressive process of isolation, alienation and solipsistic introversion, that leads to the end of the novel, in which one of his friends dies –Fierro, with a weak character and diabetic, considered by the group as queer and masochistic– during his own birthday party, due to a lethal mix of alcohol and cocaine.

It was the first book of a Kronen tetralogy, the other volumes being called Mensaka (1995), Ciudad rayada (“Lined city”, 1998) and Sonko95 (1995).

There is more information available in the English Wikipedia article on José Ángel Mañas (Madrid, 1971).

Sounds like a Spanish Irvine Welsh to this blogger, heavy stuff for conservative tastes… though Mañas’ lesser-known novels and essays on the literature business might be interesting.

SOURCE: Algaida (publisher); Wikipedia (Spanish); Llucia Ramis’ weekly literary column “Superglú” in La Vanguardia, Nov. 16, 2019, p. 46 [printed edition]

Snippet: Ximo Abadía’s “The Farmer”

It’s a New York Times / NY Public Library best illustrated children’s book of the year 2019, and its creator is a Spanish author and illustrator, Ximo Abadía (Alicante, 1983).

More information on the book is available from the publisher, Penguim Random House. Kirkus Reviews offers a review (Dec. 2018).

The author’s personal homepage offers more examples of his work.

SOURCE: Instagram (NYT Books, Nov. 2019)

Snippet: Perezagua’s “Six ways to die in Texas”

Marina Perezagua, Seis formas de morir en Texas [Six ways to die in Texas], 2019, 248 p.

publisher’s summary:

Different characters, two continents and one heart: a tragic crossroads of destinies.

This is a novel on different persons whose destiny is linked by a heart. It’s not about a symbolic heart but about a beating heart that gives life… and also death.

This is a novel about two families and two continents. A man is being judged in a Chinese prison and his organs are objects of trafficking. His heart ends up placed in a North American’s breast, and this transplant will mark the future of the following generations. According to Bhudist tradition, if a heart is not buried with the dead, he or she will never rest in peace, and therefore the heirs of the deceased must bring the organ back to China.

This is a novel about organ trafficking, sins that must be redeemed, acts of love that want to purge sins, and acts of vengeance that try to reestablish the broken harmony. Marina Perezagua constructs a meticulous and disturbing plot that talks about the essence of human beings, about chance and about destiny. The author, who has established herself as one of the essential voices of contemporary Spanish narrative, offers us a dazzling and troubling book.

Spanish state RTVE’s Página Dos literary program offers an author interview [Spanish]  in which the parts of the book dealing with the US prison system and death row there take up a lot more space than the details described in the publisher’s summary.

There is a Wikipedia article [English] on the writer Marina Perezagua (Sevilla, 1978). Amazon.com offers one of her novels in English.

SOURCE: Anagrama (publisher)

Snippet: Carme Riera’s “In the last shade of blue” (25th anniversary edition, 2019)

Carme Riera, Dins el darrer blau [In the last shade of blue / Blue horizons of no return], 1994/2019, 336 p.

publisher’s summary:

An anniversary: 25 years ago there was published one of the most important novels of modern Catalan narrative, Dins el darrer blau, and this new edition, revised by the author, is thus a celebration. Invited to the party are all of the readers who years ago read the terrible story of the “xuetes” [“conversos” or “Crypto-Jews” – Wikipedia] who tried to flee the Inquisition in Majorca, and also welcome are all the future readers who through these pages wind and unwind the hopes, fears, illusions and disappointments of some characters whose misery, that comes down upon them in 1688, is narrated with intrigue and poetry. [From Manuel Forcano’s foreword.]

The critics call it one of the most important Catalan novels of the 20th century. It is certainly Carme Riera’s most prize-winning one.

According to the Wikipedia article on Carme Riera, this novel is being translated into English by Kathleen McNerney.

There are older posts on Riera’s works from 2016 and 2018.

SOURCE: Grup 62 (Planeta; publisher)