Andreu Claret, born in Occitan exile in 1946, returns to the theme of war in his latest novel, 1939. The fall of Barcelona (Column). The last days of the war in the Catalan capital, the character of Lluís Companys and the thousands of people who, like his mother, undertook the path of exile are the elements that center this story of the veteran journalist.
“Why do I go back to the subject of war? Claret wonders. My mother, in 1939, went into exile with her family. One of the things she and my grandparents told me is that they had to throw things away, like a pram on wheels. My grandmother also had to throw away the silverware that had been given to her when she got married. It was a humble family, peasants from Manresa and Súria. My grandmother only kept one teaspoon, and I used it every day for breakfast. With that spoon I ate the yogurts that my grandmother made, because then yogurts were made, they were not bought ”.
A total loss
“On the way into exile, my grandmother had to throw away the silverware that she had been given when she got married. It was a humble family, peasants from Manresa and Súria. My grandmother only kept a teaspoon “
He does not keep the spoon, but he does keep many of those memories alive, which are the ones with which he has built this fiction. In exile, President Companys was accompanied by Manel Plandiure, a boxer who acts as his escort and who is forced to leave Agnieszka, his lover, a Polish prostitute, in Barcelona. And with these characters, we will get to know this story of our recent history.
The will to novelize the war is firm for Claret: “The war was not talked about here, it was closed tight. But in exile they talked constantly ”. And he adds: “There is not much Catalan literature from 1939 and it seemed important to me to tell about my mother’s trip from Manresa to what was then called the line. It is a novel about social defeat, but also about those who resisted ”.
“There is a lack of literature on the crowd that walked towards the border. And little has been said about the bombings of Barcelona, Granollers and Figueres. Gernika has the Picasso painting, but in Figueres it was a drama ”, he concludes.
The author acknowledges that the character of Companys was growing: “My father spoke to me a lot about Companys, they were friends, about ERC. This issue has been around for a long time and I have tried to give it a voice. My father always said that he was a very good person, which was a way of saying that everything he encountered, all the management, was as it was. He was lost and abandoned by his own. His drama was also the drama of the Republic ”.
But Claret clarifies: “I shy away from the figure of the martyr president and also from the simplification that points out that it was all his fault. The fiction that I create, with Agnieszka and Irene Polo, helps me to tell everything that happened ”. And he announces that with this novel he closes a trilogy on the Civil War, preceded by The brigadier’s secret and The consul of Barcelona. “The next novel will no longer be on this topic.”
–
