A room full of books has a cozy air. It is also aesthetic. Albert Serra likes to be surrounded by them, and it strikes him not to see them in the homes of the rich. His admirer Karl Lagerfeld claimed to have three hundred thousand, but the designer’s own bookseller assures that it exceeded a million; he needed entire apartments to store them. Serra’s are distributed between Barcelona, ??Banyoles (he has been moving the most voluminous ones there) and Paris, where he has a shared flat with a Lisbon co-producer. The problem is lack of space. And excess weight. Serra travels a lot, and tries not to be heavily loaded; he sometimes reads on Kindle, but he doesn’t enjoy it the same.
Knowledge occupies space and almost every corner of his flat in the Eixample, lined with shelves to the ceiling. The first was one of iron, thin sheets. Then the wooden ones arrived in the same reading room, where there is a Louis XV-style rug (or, in his case, Louis XIV), two cushions with the American flag on a small sofa, a poster for Història de la meva mort, and a wingback chair in front of the window that overlooks the street. Next to it, a few volumes on which Sumo by Helmut Newton is based, and, behind, the complete works of Balzac, Flaubert, Goethe and Tolstoy, from the Aguilar publishing house, topped by some plastic dinosaurs that someone left behind.
The books were piled up on the hydraulic floor and more shelves had to be made in the dining room, at the entrance, in the kitchen. At first I grouped them by theme: cinema, art, history, philosophy, poetry, fashion, music, theater, economics. But immediately the thing took a personal order. He has them located by heart. For example, when discussing Russian literature, he mentions Memory of the Dead House, his favorite Dostoevsky. He knows it’s on one of the forty shelves in the dining room, around here. While he looks for it, they look at us at a poster of Honor de cavalleria and large framed photos of Lluís Carbó and Lluís Serrat Masanellas, recurring in his films. He finds it.
One book leads to another. And curiosity, and passion. Goethe made him discover Beaumarchais, “perhaps one of the most extraordinary characters in history, he has incredible rhetoric”; he read the biography of him during confinement. He also read The Confessions of Rosseau and The London Journal, by James Boswell. He likes the libertine literature of the 18th century and the French literature of the 19th and 20th. And although he does not have a plan when it comes to buying them, he is up to date thanks to conversations with friends and magazines such as the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books. He buys many in France because, he points out, people there earn infinitely more than here, but books are infinitely cheaper. Reading in English makes him lazier. He is not a fetishist, although he has several volumes of the Pléiade. He has photographed them to avoid buying them twice (he happened to her on one occasion). He has multiple editions of The Iliad and the Bernat Metge classics. And a collection of military strategy published by the Ministry of Defence.
Constantly read about World War II, so momentous that we still live its consequences. He has books on Goebbels and at least two on the Trump presidency: John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened and Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which he considers a masterpiece: “You understand why he won.” He likes memoirs, correspondence, biographies, and there are some by Lagerfeld, Ava Gardner, Andy Warhol… and Tony Ryan (Serra must be the person who has the most books on the founder of Ryanair: six). Among his favorite writers is the historian Paul Veyne, and Roberto Longhi has greatly influenced him. He has read À la recherche du temps perdu two and a half times.
And in the midst of Proust, Stendhal, Simone de Beauvoir, Marquis de Sade, Casanova and Tout Saint-Simon, My Dark Place by James Ellroy surprises. He admits that he is more interested in the author than in his work: it is unique, he says, no two are alike, everything happens to him, it is fascinating. He reads more Saul Bellow. And to Houellebecq. “Naipaul and Coetzee are very good.” Elfriede Jelinek too, she has everything of her, but her theater doesn’t excite her; too grotesque. She suddenly finds Stéréoscope, by Marina de Van, “she is delusional, a very strange actress, her addiction to drugs and her consequent free fall, autobiographical; they would have to translate it.”
Spanish and Catalan literature does not motivate him much, although there is no shortage of Josep Pla, Palau i Fabre, Gabriel Ventura or Joanot Martorell. There is La Regenta, surely from when he studied Hispanic Philology and Theory of Literature at the UB. Two decades later, she has won two Césars with Pacificction, considered the best film of the year by the prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma. Faced with Norman Mailer’s letters, he exclaims: “The amount of work they got to do!”, as if it were not attributable to himself. He is now working on a new script, and at the end of March he will publish Un brindis per Sant Martirià in H
In addition to space and weight, there is the time factor. On the kitchen shelf, there are cookbooks; a collection about cheeses, eat cheese every day. He cooks well, but little, because he doesn’t stop. He misses reading long novels, he says that they allow you to live in a different world, far from yourself. Reading is the only way for him to learn fun things, and he can read less and less. Which does not mean that I continue to buy books. The last ones are on the table, waiting for their place in Albert Serra’s library.
