With its Barri Gòtic invented by dreamy bourgeois, its Arc del Triomf that makes no reference to any triumph and its Chinatown without Chinese, Barcelona is a city that emerges from its own fantasies. There are many writers who have portrayed her and who have dreamed of her, like Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who left us in 2020. Since then, his gaze has been less stylized and labyrinthine than Zafón’s, with a more thorny realism.

Revancha (Anagrama, 2021) is a novel by Kiko Amat that scratches and sparks. A Barcelona full of edges and grudges where the protagonists are violent and have all their compasses broken. They are skinheads, they met at the South Goal of the Camp Nou and their life has not stopped rolling, but towards hell.

That in Barcelona everything is about to explode, Sergi Doria, guardian of the journalistic and literary memory of Barcelona, ??reminds us in Before they forget us (Destination, 2021). It begins in Barceloneta in 1875, where the explosion of the Express steamer, loaded with bombs and ammunition, deafens even the bells of the Church of Sant Miquel. The plot will take us a hundred years later to the Barcelona that looks out in amazement and uncovers the death of Franco when the diaries of someone appear explaining what happened in the freighter explosion a century ago.

In this city that tourists adore, at least until their wallets are stolen on the subway, nobody gives anything away. In Simón (Blackie Books, 2020) Miqui Otero walks us through the different environments of a city with many floors and some basements. Simón grew up in the bar of his parents and his uncles, Galician emigrants, with a clientele of workers and taxi drivers. His social ascent is a flight forward. We will see him break into the Barcelona of fusion cuisine with his needy recipes and show us, parallel to his life, the rise of the city in 1992 and the fall with the world crisis of 2008.

In Love Song (Salamandra, 2022) Carlos Zanón, author of tough novels written with infinite tenderness, makes Sandino, the protagonist of Taxi, drive us again. He is the chauffeur who takes three purist musicians in matters of drugs and music on a downhill tour through campsites and rowdy seaside venues. It is his least Barcelona novel, but even so it begins and almost ends in that Barcelona that he loves and that stings him: “Eight hundred euros. A small sink. A little balcony. Barcelona/Disneyland”.

Albert Lladó graduated in Philosophy, but has a lot of streets. The one that has given him journalism and being from Ciutat Meridiana, a peripheral neighborhood far from the heart of the city, as he recounted in La travesía de las anguillas. In Malpaís (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022), the location of the action is in the center of the city, but somehow it becomes the periphery again: a periphery in the center because the action takes place in a squatted house. Víctor del Árbol knows the periphery for a long time, who grew up in the alluvial neighborhood of Torre Baró and from there, without running water in the houses, Ciutat Meridiana in the distance seemed like Manhattan to them. He tells it with his dramatic power in the overwhelming novel The Father’s Son (Destiny, 2021).

Barcelona is many Barcelonas. It is the city of emigration and the peripheries, but also the bourgeois city. Pilar Eyre in When We Were Yesterday (Planet, 2022) places us at the epicenter of late-60s elegance: the Ritz hotel. Although in his story, which takes us to the gates of Olympic Barcelona, ??the rich also cry and love breaks down all social barriers. Milena Busquets is a neighborhood writer, although her neighborhood is Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, where there are still service entrances in the buildings. In Gema (Anagrama, 2021) the need to apprehend the memory that slips away from a classmate who died in adolescence makes us move in a world of wealthy and independent women. An even more vivid portrait of that Barcelona from above is traced in Las palabras justas (Anagrama, 2022), a diary narrated with that carefree charm of her writing.

We couldn’t close this quick tour of literary Barcelona without naming the head of the band. Eduardo Mendoza has earned the title: he made his debut with La verdad del Caso Savolta telling the hectic Barcelona of the 1910s and 45 years later he published the closing of his trilogy Rufo Batalla, Transhipment to Moscow (Seix Barral, 2021). There are notes on the Olympic preparation although here Barcelona is less of a protagonist, the look is more general (and melancholic) at the events that took place in Spain and the world between 1970 and 1990. However, the wedding of Rufo Batalla with a girl from the bourgeoisie With that Mendozaian irony, as elegant as it is devastating, it allows him to draw a precise portrait of the social inequalities of Casa Nostra.