Homage to Barcelona (edition 2002)

In 1965, living in Madrid, my wife and I decided to drive to southern France to visit her Armenian cousins. A French friend of ours, learning of our trip, asked if she could tag along. At that time the journey by highway was long and arduous. To make the most of our vacation time, we drove through the night, arriving in Barcelona in the early morning.

We stopped at a small café for a light breakfast. Neither my wife nor I spoke French and our French friend did not speak English so Castilian was our common tongue. It was certainly clear given our accents that we were not native Spaniards. We asked the Catalan waiter, in Castilian, for “tres cafés con leche y una racion de tostados.” He brought us the coffees and a large order of hard Melba toast. What we had wanted was hot, toasted bread and when we explained that Melba toast was not what we had anticipated, he answered: “I don’t know what’ tostado’ is in Madrid, but here in Cataluña you got what you ordered.”

I was convinced at the time and have remained convinced that the waiter knew exactly what we wanted when we ordered “tostado.” What he was doing was making the point to three young foreigners that Barcelona was Cataluña not Castilla—it was its own nationality with its clear distinctions.

Between 1962 and 1979, I spent a number of years in Spain, traveling extensively throughout the Peninsula with the exception of Cataluña. I have perhaps been in or through Barcelona no more than 7 or 8 times; and, except for the usual highlights like the Ramblas and the Gaudi monuments, have little memory of those brief visits.

I must admit that I have had some mild disinterest in Barcelona and its hinterland stemming no doubt from my Castilian and Latin America bias as well as some antipathy for brash nationalism like the kind displayed by that waiter in 1965. Colm Tóibín’s Homage to Barcelona, although written almost a quarter century ago, has done a masterful job in not only shaming me for that disinterest but in piquing my desire for a more detailed exploration of Barcelona and its people.

It did take several chapters for me to get into Tóibín’s narrative. For me initially, his strengths were the discussions of people (Gaudí, Picasso, Miró) and the Spanish Civil war. But I re-read the opening discussions of the gothic quarter and of the Eixample and found their strengths.

Much has happened in Spain and in Cataluña since Tóibín’s 1992 addition to the Homage. But, although Tóibín stops before the events of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st Century, Homage to Barcelona remains bright and engaging. He has certainly set me up for Robert Hughes Barcelona.
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Of all the books about Barcelona I have read, this was the most atmospheric and personal one. Nice reading, but I learned least factual information about Barcelona from it.
I would recommend Barcelona- the Great Enchantress for a similar style of a personal narrative, more info and a better story. ( )

http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/homage-to-barcelona-colm-toibin/ ( )

http://homepage.mac.com/shawjonathan/iblog/C891102405/E20070209200259/index.html ( )