STEPHANIE ALLISON

This month it was all Catalonia, almost all the time, for our official reader.

DAILY: New York Times (online and print), Wall Street Journal, Financial Times (online and print), Washington Post (online), New York Post (online), Science Daily (online), Three Quarks Daily, Politico.com
WEEKLY: Economist, Guardian Weekly, New Yorker, National Review (online)
BI-WEEKLY: New York Review of Books
MONTHLY: Harper’s, Atlantic, Allure, Bitch, Vogue, Hastings Center Report, American Journal of Bioethics, Nature, Neuroscience

TITLE	AUTHOR	COMMENT
The Patrick Melrose novels	Edward St. Aubyn	The hype is unhelpful when approaching these accomplished, sharp-edged and very funny books (Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk and At Last). They are good enough that one wishes for more depth and less schematic psychology, without the loss of the glistering surface. A good way to spend a lost weekend, if one has the leisure. I look forward to revisiting them in a decade or two.
The South	Colm Toibin	Set in Catalonia and Ireland, this first novel of Tobin’s speaks to questions of national and personal identity. His visual description of both places suggests that they are etched onto his retinas. He writes especially well about the sense of arrival in a singular culture and physical space that coming to Barcelona and Catalonia has for many.
Barcelona, Catalonia—A View From the Inside	Matthew Tree	A hodgepodge of previously published articles on the political trials and personal pleasures of living in Barcelona and becoming a Catalan. Slapdash editing, but a good introduction for English-language readers to Catalan dissatisfaction.
What Catalans Want: Could Catalonia Become Europe’s Next State?	Toni Strubell
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda	Mercè Rodoreda, trans. Martha Tennent	This anthology of the very fine Catalan writer Rodoreda includes work drawn from throughout her writing life. Concentrated, disconsolate stories of lives hedged in by convention, and imaginations that exceed the available possibilities. Full of references to Barcelona locales and habits of living that will be familiar to today’s visitor to the city. Paris is also a setting, and similarly resonant. Rodoreda is wonderful not only on women’s lives but also on women’s dress, not a small matter.
The Time of the Doves	Mercè Rodoreda, trans. David Rosenthal	This is Rodoreda’s Spanish Civil War novel, a psychological narrative of personal and national independence, precisely coordinating the two realms. Even in translation, one feels the presence of a writer fully in command of her style and of the materials of her era, public and private. (Originally published in 1962, during the long Franco repression of Catalan cultural life.)
A Broken Mirror	Mercè Rodoreda, trans. Josep Miquel Sobrer	A historical novel presented as a family narrative, structured in short chapters to kaleidoscopic effect. Rodoreda has been compared to Virginia Woolf, and reading A Broken Mirror, one can understand why. (Originally published in the mid-70s, at the ossified end of the Franco era.)
Teresa l’après-midi	Juan Marsé	A French translation of this Catalan writer’s mid-60s novel found in a Barcelona used bookstore frequented by English-speaking expats. (I believe there is no English translation available, despite Marsé’s recognition by the mainstream Spanish cultural establishment.) A hard-edged skewering of both working-class ambition and bourgeois complacency in mid-1950s Barcelona—a novel of bad manners. Still, Marsé is sympathetic to all his actors and the character-driven aspects of this novel are fully persuasive.
Homage to Catalonia	George Orwell	Read because it looms over English-language readers in Catalonia as a must, and to spend the time with Orwell.

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