A few months ago I attended a very instructive talk between Borja de Riquer (Barcelona, ​​1945) and Andreu Claret (Acs, França, 1946) on history and the novel. The historian –said Riquer– not only reconstructs the past: he explains, analyzes and interprets so that today’s people can understand things. Being a historian is a job that is not only learned by reading: you have to investigate. Memories, he added, are not history. And you have to be careful because they always have an ideological bias.
Claret, who is a solid man, with extensive experience in different fields (he has been a delegate of the Efe Agency in Africa and Central America, a contributor to newspapers and radio programs and director of the Institut Català de la Mediterrà nia) defended that the function of the historical novel is to teach and make one dream. As Manzoni said: the writer has to restore the meat on the skeleton of the story. He is an honest man and he also quoted Ortega y Gasset with an easily shared idea: the historical novel does not satisfy literature or history. Above all – I now add – since it has become a best-seller genre.
With the Manzonian idea in mind, Claret has written three novels set during the war, about the international brigades (El secret del brigadista, 2008), about the Soviet intervention in republican Catalonia (El cònsol de Barcelona, ​​2019) and La caiguda de Barcelona (2021). That the word Barcelona appears in two out of three titles seems significant to me. The Barcelona history bestseller is an important subgenre.
What does Claret mean when he talks about restoring the flesh on the bones of history? The entire first part of ParÃs érem nosaltres recounts the training of a young man from Súria who learns the trade as a carpenter and enters the world of politics. There is an ideological position, of course – in the case of many families in the Cardener Valley ruined by phylloxera and subjected to abuse by manufacturers. But the key is given by material, mundane objects. In order to be independent of his parents and see the world, the protagonist has two items that would not appear in a history book: a pool cue and a Zündapp motorcycle (which he later changes to a Rudge-Whitworth). He is a great pool player and they claim him in casinos here and there, with the motorcycle he can go. Thanks to the cue and the motorcycle, he met LluÃs Companys and all his experience of seeing people suffer materialized in political action. His friends (El Malcarat, El Quico, El Pèsol) represent action workers, cowardly republicanism (which will lead to Francoism) and Catalanism. Did these three friends exist? Don’t know. But they are convenient for the novelist to show the dilemmas he faced… his father.
The novel –and this is new– reconstructs the life of Andreu Claret Casadesús (1908-2005), the author’s father, who played a fundamental role in stopping the chaos of La Fatarella (when a group of FAI militiamen shot thirty and four peasants who resisted the collectivization of their lands) and who actively participated in the clandestine exile. In France and Andorra he led an adventurous life: he worked in a circus, earned money from forests in Occitania, went bankrupt and became the Snowman of Port d’Envalira. Porcioles asked him to lower the snowplows after the snowfall of ’62. Here, before “del seu ensuperbiment†(Claret dixit), the story ends which, along the way, loses fictional elements, fictitious reconstructions, forced stories, to remain in the bones, not of history, but of the memory of a son in relation to his father, with whom he did not quite fit. This most naked part is the most interesting, Claret is emotionally and sentimentally involved, there is conflict and a narrative point.
