On March 31, 2008, time stands still in Paris, where a snowfall prevents its inhabitants from leaving their homes. The next day cannot be just any day, so it will be March 32 (Cathedral), the Spanish title of the new novel by Xavier Bosch (Barcelona, ??1967), whose original version in Catalan is published by Univers. The writer has placed her in the French capital in various plots that take place in two periods: on the one hand, that 2008 with Barbara, a literary agent, and Roger, a photojournalist from Empordà who settles in her apartment; on the other, the Nazi occupation in which Margaux, Barbara’s grandmother, lives a love story.
We spoke with Bosch in Montmartre, a few meters from the apartment where his protagonists live: “It is an apartment with an old radio, a red sofa, a cactus and a single book, and there are no photographs on display. Here are the lives of Barbara, who is 41 years old, and that of her grandmother, who is 83 but was born on that floor and when she was 16 the Germans occupied the city, they make me think about the passage of time, a recurring theme in my novels , just like journalism or love”.
The granddaughter-grandmother relationship is one of the origins of the book: “I had wanted to pay tribute to this unconditional bond of love for a long time. I have written novels about passionate love, long-term friendship, analysis of the relationship as a couple, even about siblings, but I had never touched this bond and it is one of the most beautiful things in life”. And he pays homage to the elderly: “Our grandparents were also young. The poet Francesc Garriga wrote in his last book, on the threshold of death: ‘Havíem estat peces d’ antiquari. / avui som trastos vells, / els vells’. They are not old junk. They have given us everything and they deserve everything, we cannot leave them by the hand of God in the last curve of life”, says Bosch, who admits that he does without mothers in his novels: “I do it almost without realizing it . In the first (La màgia dels reis, 1994) he is a volunteer, because my mother died at the age of 46. But later I find that, without thinking, many young widowers appear in other novels. Here it happens again, although differently”.
The granddaughter is unaware of a part of her grandmother’s life, during the German occupation, which occupies the central part of the book. “Luckily everyone has a secret part that they keep just for themselves, for whatever. Do we know everything, from our parents, from our grandparents or from our children? Probably not. Sometimes the truth is dangerous. And in this novel it is”. In addition, there are characters that look like one thing and are another: “When I was young, Garriga told me to read Simenon, from whom I tried to learn two things. One, the short sentence, the constriction of the rhetoric and going straight to the barracks. The second is that he was fascinated by the hidden face of people. For me, a novel is the sum of a plot or plot plus literature, and the plot gives me a lot of action, many edges.
The spark for the book was an exhibition that was held in 2008 in Paris with photographs under the Nazi occupation: “You only saw happiness, fashion, and you didn’t see the line of hunger or the rationing of bread, or people dead from cold the years 1940 and 1942, with terrible winters”. Many photographs were published in Signal magazine: “It was the great fake news of the moment, a very well edited magazine that touched on all journalistic genres, where precisely because it was beautiful, well written and well portrayed, people believed it”. Propaganda “sold Paris as a showcase to show the world: concerts, the great theaters, the Comédie, the opera, the cinemas, the radios followed”… And at the same time, the French “wanted to show themselves to them and to the world that they were defeated militarily but not morally or culturally. And it tastes bad to me because the phrase was said by Marshal Petain ”.
One of those photographs has a central weight in a novel that Bosch assures is “not historical”: “After all, I write the novels that I would like to read. I have read this as if I did not know the author and it has hooked me ”.
Catalan version, here