“I spend a lot of time talking about the posh ones,” says Marc Giró talking about his new book, Encara més pijos. Practical guide (Univers), in which he insists on the caricature of those who used to be called good people. The editor Ester Pujol explains that under the apparent frivolity, and with a great sense of humor, what Giró does is a criticism of privilege.
But wasn’t there perhaps enough with Giró’s previous book, from March 2021? On the one hand, the presenter of the Vostè primer de RAC1 confesses that after having sold 10,000 copies of the first book, he had to continue: “It is a great merit that someone like me, from my social background, lives off the posh”, and starts level of the luxury car sellers or the manguis of Passeig de Gràcia. But he also saw that things were left in the pipeline, such as the variants that exist in Spain. Thus, like a Dian Fossey who instead of gorillas studies upper-class humans – this is how Ester Pujol has said it – we read the specificities of the posh Madrid, Andalusian, Valencian, Basque, Galician, Balearic, Asturian or Santander… of the international or the modernist. Pure and hard taxonomy.
In any case, “it is about observing privilege, and if we cannot be privileged, let us criticize it.” Of course, reading the book – which will be presented on Saturday at the Setmana del Llibre in Català – one can also find that “the more you think about it, the more you see that you have them close, and perhaps even inside”.
“Many readers will wonder if they are,” says Pujol, but they will do so with a smile and a very expressive style that reflects how he speaks and implies it, and although it may not seem like it, “it is well documented.”
At the end, in the JOK restaurant and cocktail bar, Adrià Batlle serves us a cocktail that he has created for the occasion: the Upper Diagonal, made with raspberries, elderflowers, Okinawan yuzu and vodka, which according to the barman is “the most what’s up?”
Catalan version, here
