Saturday, March 27, 2021

Three narrators, three stories, one city.

Rupert Thomson’s latest fiction arrived on my desk with high praise from Colm Tóbín, Philip Pullman, and Andrea Wulf. The publisher bills Barcelona Dreaming as a novel, but it is three long stories with several linked characters. Significant characters in one story are minor or peripheral in another.

Barcelona Dreaming is Thomson’s thirteenth work of fiction (he’s also written a well-received memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop). He was born in Eastbourne in 1955, took the Cambridge entrance examination at 16, and studied medieval history and political thought. After college he taught English in Athens, wrote advertising copy in London, and has lived and worked in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Australia, and Spain. His first book, Dreams of Leaving, earned Thomson positive reviews, the sale of film rights, and $50,000 to write a screenplay. “And by the time that money ran out,” he said in an interview, “I had published a second novel and so from very early on I could be a full-time writer.”

I have no idea how long Thomson lived in Barcelona, but Barcelona Dreaming gives the impression that, as Philip Pullman says, Thomson “knows every corner of it and every kind of human being who might live there.” The stories are narrated, in turn, by an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcohol-dependent jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love. 

The English woman, Amy, has lived in Barcelona for twenty years or more is in her late 40s, is long-divorced, has a daughter attending university in England and a settled life until she finds a troubled young Moroccan man sobbing in her building’s parking garage in the middle of the night. She takes him to her apartment, gives him tea and him cab fare home. He returns a few days later with all the fixings to make her a Moroccan dinner to thank her. They become friends. Then lovers. It ends better than I expected as the story was winding up.

The 64-year-old pianist, Nacho, connects with and becomes a friend of Barcelona soccer star Rinaldinho, as much as one can be a friend of someone who is half your age, who is an international celebrity, is awash in admirers and hangers-on, and who earns more in a month than you will in a lifetime. Nacho is divorced, has a long-time live-in girlfriend, and the woman he once loved and performed with has died. This is a marvelous meditation on aging, on missed opportunities and bad decisions, and the corrosive effect of celebrity. By the end of the story one has a feeling that Rinaldinho has passed his athletic peak and has no idea what happened.

Let me quote the first paragraph of the third story to give you a sense of Thomson’s style and command of detail: “The first time I saw Vic Drago, he was on his own. I was waiting at the bus stop outside my building when the glass front door swung open and a stocky man with thinning black hair emerged. He was wearing a maroon jacket, a black shirt, and black trousers with sharp creases. A gold chain bracelet glinted on his left wrist. He stopped to light a cigarette, then strode off along the street, smoke flowing over his shoulder as he exhaled.” 

The translator is working on a French novella; he outlines its story and one of the many pleasures of Barcelona Dreaming is the way Thomson is able to have themes and incidents resonate off one another. Another pleasure is seeing a character in one story appear in another. And third is Thomson’s use of language and his perceptions. Here, taken almost at random, is the jazz pianist describing times with the woman he loved:

“There were moments during live performances—in Paris or Cologne or Amsterdam—when I would chance on harmonic progressions or melodic lines that rode along with her voice, and her eyes would meet mine across the sparkly half-darkness up onstage, amusement on her face, and a gentle pity, and even, sometimes, a glimmer of mockery or malice, at the thought that I might have the nerve to follow her, because she knew she could sing herself right out of where she stood, she could leave me for dust if she wanted to.”

In a March 2013 interview in The Guardian newspaper, Thomson is quoted as saying, “Fiction essentially teaches you to understand and empathize with other people. That's important. I think fiction is related to ethics in that you step out of your skin and become someone else for the period you are reading the book. And it is a short step to extrapolate from that to the teaching of compassion. As Amos Oz said, 'the person who imagines the other is better than the person who does not imagine the other'. For me, that is exactly the strength and raison d'etre of fiction. Film doesn't, and art doesn't, and music doesn't do it in the same way.”

Barcelona Dreaming takes a reader willing to go with it out of her skin and become someone else. 


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