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in this issue
Happiness
A literary illusion
Edicions 62: La felicitat
In view of the turn that the so-called historical novel has recently taken in the Catalan literary world, with rehashes of sentimental Cathars and personages of royal lineage such as Jaume I reduced to the transparent thinness of a sorry caricature, with Macian (and Martian) hagiographies without a trace of vital spark, it is hardly surprising that Lluís-Anton Baulenas should take every opportunity these days to distance himself from the general trend and take refuge under the broad umbrella of literature tout court. Underpinning this position, of course, is a vision of the novel as the supreme, nuclear enterprise of fiction, one which also serves to fix, like an emulsion, the colours and shadings of a photograph of an era. La felicitat thus goes beyond the pigeonholes and is perfectly in line with this approach to fiction. Throughout the book Baulenas skilfully intertwines a fascination with real events - the construction of the Via Laietana between 1907 and 1909 - the parallel (or foreground, if you prefer) narrative that recounts the trials and tribulations of a bunch of characters who wander - à la derive, we might say - through the Barcelona of the time, so wretched and so haughty.
Book after book, Baulenas has settled into an amiable style of storytelling that takes advantage of the intrigue and the cracking pace of events, but its principal virtue is that it has not brought him into the impoverishing realms of the best-seller; the narrator also knows how to focus with precision on the details and give the story certain interludes of, let's say, brilliance. In this regard La felicitat offers a couple of real pearls: the heroine's ongoing dialogues with the dead, handled with great stylistic efficacy, and the marvellous passages that deal with the lamentable destruction of the neighbourhood. From here on in the writer's craft takes care of the rest: the skill in constructing a long story with good guys and bad guys and very bad guys trapped, even if unconsciously, by the chimera of happiness. As a counterpoint to this quest there is, however, the smile, which can make people happy for a few moments, or the captivating image of the heroine "asleep, from time to time a little smile appeared on her face as if, in the land of dreams, her chasing after a little happiness might have had the slenderest possibility of success", as the narrator says. Thanks, then, to the depth of field achieved, the capacity to generate expectations that are not disappointed, and the winged lightness of the style, the paradoxical happiness of the title takes shape as we turn the pages and we can, even if only for a moment, entertain the vain illusion that, yes, now at last we are happy. And that, I believe, is what we call literature.
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