Nov. 2: 75th anniversary - bombardment of Lleida

Agustí Centelles, Bombardeig de Lleida, 1937 [(c) mnac.cat]

A short summary of the facts from a text accompanying an exhibiton by the Memorial Democràtic (1):

"Until March 1938, Lleida was the most important Catalan city of the Republican rearguard near the Aragon front. As a result, it was a place where troops passed through and it had a frontline hospital and a shelter for people retreating from the onslaught of Franco’s army. Its strategic location made it a primary target of the fascist air raids. On the 2nd November 1937, one of the cruellest attacks of the Civil War took place when nine Italian three-engine aeroplanes deployed their bombs on the city’s main thoroughfares, particularly damaging the secondary school and the Sant Lluís market. With the bombardment of the school, an institution associated with freedom of education was attacked and it became a symbol of innocent victims of the war. At least 250 people were killed in the attack, including around 50 girls and boys who were students at the school."

The school "incident" has got its own Wikipedia article here. According to some bloggers, the local historian Mercè Barallat believes that the school was targeted expressly due to its libertarian ideas.

A short Internet search leads one to a text by Josep Pla and Antonio Ruiz Mostany, published on the website of La Mañana newspaper in 2011, that gives a slightly different version at least as to the motivation behind the attack. The text, entitled "The truth about the bombardment of Lleida", cites the original orders to the flying squad found at the archives of the Italian airforce in Rome. Reading these it turns out that the bombardment of the town of Lleida (secondary target) was undertaken due to the cloudy weather above the principal target of the bombardment: the chemical industry of the town of Flix on the banks of the Ebro river. According to this article, Flix as a center of explosives' production was a legitimate military target. The tragedy was that the same (incendiary) bombs meant for an industrial site were then strewn over a town centre. As the planes stayed at a height of 4.200 to 3.600 metres so as not to become artillery targets themselves, the bombardment was a rather crude affair; apart from causing a massacre among the civilian population, a lot of bombs ended up inside the river Segre and on the farmland around Lleida. The authors remark that the report of the bombardment by the Italian aviation changed from one echelon to the next: whereas the lower ones talked openly about bombing bridges, factories and "military concentrations", the highest ones - reporting to their Spanish allies - only talk about bombing "a bridge in the vicinity of Lleida". As to the victims, Pla and Ruiz Mostany talk about 251 dead and 750 wounded.

The classic comprehensive studies on the Spanish Civil War have been written by A. Beevor, P. Preston and T. Hughes. Those concentrating on the war in Catalonia, e.g. by Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté, have not been translated into English (yet).

Endnote:
(1): Memorial Democràtic is a public institution funded by the Generalitat (regional government of Catalonia) that studies and divulges the history of Catalunya during the period of 1931 to 1980, i.e. from the second Spanish republic to the restoration of democracy after Franco's death.

Spanish National Literature Award for Javier Marías

The writer and scholar Javier Marías (Madrid, 1951) has won the Premio Nacional de Literatura [National Literature Award] in the "Narrative" section for his novel The Infatuations, to be published in the English version on March 7, 2013. This prize affirms the novel's double success - among the reading public and the critics - since its publication in Spanish 18 months ago. The award is endowed with 20.000 EUR and awarded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports to the best work of narrative published in 2011 in one of Spain's four official languages: Castilian, Galician, Basque, and Catalan.

The newspaper El País's literary supplement Babelia nominated The Infatuations Spain's book of the year 2011. On that occasion fellow writer and friend of Marías', Eduardo Mendoza, wrote: "[The novel] appears to have been written without any external or internal pressure, with absolute liberty, one of the clearest and fullest of its author, ... Only thus can be explained that he could adopt without any apparent effort or artifice a feminine voice and keep it up without fissures over 400 pages."

The novel does not talk about love but about infatuations, its state and states, and how this can "contaminate" a person. There are present various of Marías' regular topics: chance or luck, the search for truth in everyday questions, betrayal and its sequels, appearances, the things left unspoken, the memory and the presence of the deaths and their influence on the living. 

The Infatuations is Marías' novel number 11, or 13 if one counts every volume of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy independently. In it, Marías uses a female narrator for the first time. It comes after the just mentioned trilogy, finished in 2007. At that time, the fatigued writer thought he would not write anything else. But then emerged María Dolz, the narrating character and what looked to become a short novel turned out a 401-page volume in its Spanish version (352 in the English hardcover version).

As usual, according to Mendoza, "Marías does not write in a lineal or orthodox manner: he scatters the text so that the narration does not flow through cleanly drawn channels but through a natural riverbed, uneven, in which there are meanders, swirls and overflows; without ever loosing neither the direction nor the discourse's ultimate control. This mix of chaos and rigor requires an enviable mastery of the narrative technique, as demonstrated by the use of the measured anacoluthon as a literary recourse, that shocks teachers and inspectors, but that reflects so well reality's perception on the go; a precipitated perception, as sagacious as it is contradictory, and in which intervene intelligence, emotions, prejudices and limitations in a complementary and antagonistic manner." 

Marías revises these days the covers of the novel's editions in Norwegian, Finnish and English, that will all keep the image of the Spanish original.

[This is an unofficial translation of most of Winston Manrique Sabogal's article published on Oct. 25, 2012, in El País.com]

Marías does not accept any awards by state institutions, parties, etc. as he does not want to be seen as "tainted" by any political party, power, etc.  What is more, he opposes the current goverment's cuts in its cultural programs.

Penguin Modern Classics: Javier Marías

The news is from El País in English here. The titles already available in the Penguin Classics series here.

Planeta book prize 2012

Last night, the highest doted prize in literature after the Nobel, in the 61st edition of the Planeta book prize, was awarded to Lorenzo Silva (Madrid, 1966) for his novel La marca del meridiano ["The meridian's mark"; 600.000 EUR]; runner up was Mara Torres with La vida imaginaria ["The imaginary life"; 120.000 EUR].

Silva is best-known as author of the crime novel saga starring the "civilian guards" Bevilacqua and Chamorro. He started his literary career in 1995 with Noviembre sin violetas ["November without violets"], and in 2000 he received the Nadal book prize for El alquimista impaciente ["The impatient alquimist"]. Silva who is from Madrid and married to a Catalan, gave thanks for the prize with a short speech in Catalan and expressed his wish that there was never any more division between his beloved Madrid and his beloved Barcelona than the meridian, an imaginary line.
Apart from crime novels he also authored other works of fiction and non-fiction such as tales, articles, poetry and literary and historical essays. Up to the year 2000 he (also) worked as auditor, tax consultant, and lawyer, but from age 14 he has written.

The "Bevilacqua series" so far consists of:
El lejano país de los estanques ["The far-away ponds' country"],
El alquimista impaciente ["The impatient alquimist"],
Nadie vale más que otro. Cuatro asuntos de Bevilacqua ["Nobody's worth more than somebody else. Four Bevilacqua cases"],
La reina sin espejo ["The mirror-less queen"], and
La estrategia del agua ["The water strategy"].

Silva is considered an eminence in the field of crime novels as he is also the organizer of the crime novel festival Madrid Getafe Negro, and co-comissioner of the Santiago Negro festival in Santiago de Chile.

La Vanguardia newspaper, in which was published all of the above information, also highlights Silva's activities on Twitter and as a blogger of Los trabajos y los días ["The works and the days"], dedicated to his readers.

The Wikipedia has an article on Lorenzo Silva, but none of his works has been translated into English (so far).

Liber book fair

This week, from Oct. 2 to 5, took place the annual Liber book fair in Barcelona (taking turns with Madrid). Its official website in English is here.
A few notes, grasped from an article in La Vanguardia newspaper on Oct. 3:
Barcelona is the Spanish publishing capital with an annual turnover of 3 bn EUR; 75% of this comes from Spanish-language media. The national market is in recession: in 2011 it shrunk by 4,1%, this year it could be another reduction by 7%. There is some hope in rising exports to Latin America. This trade fair expected 7000 visitors with offers by 459 publishing houses and printing presses from 15 countries, and 459 internatial buyers from 54 countries. The guest country was Paraguay.
Commentators remarked the absence of some big players of the Spanish-language book market: Random House Mondadori, Anagrama, Tusquets, Edhasa were not represented.
They don't see much sense in a book fair that is only second for the Spanish language (the Guadalajara (Mexico) book fair is bigger), and that comes just before the biggest annual book fair in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
Topics of discussion were e.g. literature for the iPad, booktrailers, and the different VAT treatment in Spain of digital media (21%) and classical printed books (4%).

And article of El País newspaper book lovers might like, entitled "Reading for free in Madrid" here.