It couldn’t be any other way, and no matter who you talked to, the first topic of conversation was the rain, because if it rains today it won’t rain tomorrow – let’s see if it’s true and the water that fell during the La Vanguardia festival serves to So be it-.
Laura Gost – Proa con Cendres award to the pool – hopes that “at least it won’t be like 2022.” The proximity due to the absence of the terrace makes it difficult to circulate: some groups barely move and at the same time it is easier for everyone to find each other.
Marta Carnicero reunites with some colleagues from the musical group of writers Malalletra, Elisenda Roca, Jordi Campoy and Salvador Macip. Carnicero sees Jesús Carrasco, a writer she has been following for a long time, and she wants to greet him, but on the way she meets the critic Juan Antonio Masoliver and she cannot help but greet him. Then, of course, she loses sight of Carrasco and starts chatting with the writers Carlota Gurt, Melcior Comes and Pere Antoni Pons and the editor Rosa Rey. You eat, convinced, and praise the croquettes, “the best of literature!” he jokes.
When Carnicero meets the author of In Praise of the Hands (Seix Barral), he confesses that every year he is surprised by Sant Jordi, because “it is something unique in the world, no matter how much they try to replicate it in other places it doesn’t quite work if It’s not here, and it’s a shame.”
Monika Zgustová is leaving early, because like so many others today she has a busy day, or perhaps more so, because in addition to the signings she will do in the morning in Barcelona, ??in the afternoon she presents I am Milena from Prague (Galaxia Gutenberg) at the Student Residence in Madrid on the occasion of Franz Kafka’s centenary – the Milena of her title, Milena Jesenská, was much more than a friend of the Czech writer. She doesn’t mind the effort, of course.
Josep Martí Blanch comes a long way from Jaume Clotet – he won the Josep Pla prize with The Brotherhood of the Fallen Angel (Destino). “Man, the winner!”, he shouts before giving himself a big hug and catching up.
When it has stopped raining, people go out to the terrace, where Rodrigo Fresán is chatting about cinema with Ricard Ruiz Garzón – who, of course, is wearing a T-shirt from the Festival 42 that he directs. He tells her that he no longer expects much from cinema, that his demands are not the same as with books, of which he does ask everything. Then someone tells Fresán that this summer he wants to read Moby Dick (the Argentine writer dedicated a book to Herman Melville), and he says that well, that “summer is for having a good time,” and first it seems that he wants to say that it is better to dedicate it to something else, but just in case he insists that it is a great book, that he read it when he was 12 years old and was fascinated by it. And he also, just in case, asks if he is referring to the entire book and not an adapted version, which of course is not the same.
Next door, Elisenda Roca is now with Agnès Busquets – who is excited that someone still remembers the book she published a year ago – and Marta Bayarri (Les papallones no mosseguen, Navona), and between one thing and another the conversation goes towards poetry, which Bayarri assures that “you don’t have to understand it, it is like a landscape, which is always there and it is you, as a reader, who has to know how to see it.”
A little further away, but already sheltered from the four drops that are now falling, the South African writer Lauren Beukes is very excited because, although she has come to Barcelona before – it has been Ruiz Garzón saying it and appearing, because he actually came for the first edition of the Festival 42–, has heard a lot about Sant Jordi and can’t wait for it to arrive to sign a few copies of Bridge (Mai Més).
