The group’s name came from the spine of a book: Mishima, by John Nathan. David Carabén was talking on the phone and when he saw him he said it out loud. Or maybe he invented this memory and tells it like that. Be that as it may, the Japanese author’s novels are part of his library, in white Ikea Billy’s (the two next to the television, collected from the street). The balconies overlook a recently opened superilla, in a modernist apartment where he and Flora arrived almost twenty years ago, shortly before his son Guerau was born. Behind the sofa, some kettlebells or gyrias have taken away the lower back pain that he has had since he was twenty-three (hence his braced legs, he says). He became fond of it during confinement. He also to audiobooks. Since then he listens to them especially when he goes out for a walk with his dog Nit.
Caraben is curious. And a newsletter, an article, leads to others. He interviewed the physicist in complex systems Ricard Solé, and three more have come out of his book, “I follow threads like this”. He’s always with ten at a time, and forgets he was reading any, he gets it back later. Between 2007 and 2010 he read a lot about the history of religions and the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. He had lost interest in narrative – “like everyone else with age” – until four months ago when he came across an interview with Louis-Ferdinand Céline on YouTube: “We are in a time when you come across videos of people the one you idolized as a teenager and had only seen in photos”. Returning to Journey to the End of the Night and Death on Credit twenty-five years later “has been super cool and terrifying.” He has also recently read A repèl, by Huysmans, “beautifully translated by Martí i Pol, and which inspired Gainsbourg’s alter ego, that dandy with exquisite taste and a bit vicious”.
He likes the classics, Dostoevsky, Melville, Poe. He has reread the adventures of Sherlock Holmes a million times. His grandfather had a well-bound collection of books and inherited respect for the object. His older brother, Armand, was a good reader (later he would be a translator, of Els jocs de la fam, for example) and David wanted to participate in the conversations with his father, who would instill in him a taste for economic disclosure. His mother was more of novels. He is recovering the modern classics of Edhasa, and Guerau freaks out with Hesse (Roc we’ll see). Carabén has books from when he studied Political Science –one year in France–, music, cinema, his latest obsession was David Milch. He is a fan of Vinyoli, Baudelaire, Auden.
He understands the library as “the way in which you work for it”. It still preserves a part ordered chronologically, from the Bible, the Koran, Greek mythology and the Middle Ages, to the contemporaries. Downstairs are cookbooks and a shelf dedicated to shopping malls. Another is dedicated to cool, a topic he talks about in Elisava, where he teaches. If a book marks him, he forces himself not to finish it so that it stays with him for a long time. He happened to him with The fall of public man, by Richard Sennett, or with The closure of the modern mind, by Allan Bloom. He is no longer so passionate, but when his manager Gerardo Sanz gave him El maestro Juan Martínez that he was there, he bought all the books by Chaves Nogales published in Libros del Asteroid.
He reads more digitally than he thought, and thus he steals a few minutes on the subway or in bowling, from the iPad, where the repertoire of songs is. On paper, he recovers the sensations of when he was a child: calm, that the afternoon opens up and entering a state of flow. In bookstores he buys an anticipation of all that, “I buy time.” He needs at least two hours to get on, and sometimes he reads in the kitchen, because cross-air passes from the light well into the corridor. He underlines with a lead pencil, draws a star next to the passages he likes. For a time he made chips. He still copies fragments that he reviews and that inspire him.
They are different dispositions of the soul, he says. With a physical book, time passes more slowly and you enter more, you concentrate more. And by having the digression so close at hand in the digital, the reading is more superficial because you get lost in searches and references. He does not despise it at all, on the contrary, he finds it glorious: “It’s something we didn’t have, we didn’t jump from one book to another with the ease of now.”
