The name of the group 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 the memory and now explains it like this. Be that as it may, the Japanese author’s novels are part of his library, in white Ikea Billys (the ones next to the TV, picked up from the street). The balconies overlook a brand new superilla, in a modernist flat where he and Flora arrived almost twenty years ago, shortly before their son Guerau was born. Behind the sofa, some Russian weights or gyries have taken away the lower back pain he has had since he was twenty-three (hence the legs in brackets, he says). He became fond of it during the confinement. He is also fond of audiobooks. Since then, he listens to them especially when he goes for a walk with the dog Nit.
Carabén is curious. And a newsletter, an article, they take it 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 always has ten at the same time, and forgets that he was reading one, retrieves it later.
Between 2007 and 2010 I read a lot of 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 he found an interview with Louis-Ferdinand Céline on YouTube: “We are in a time when you come across videos of people in who you idolized as a teenager and had only seen in photos”. Returning to Journey to the bottom of the night and Death on credit twenty-five years later “has been very cool and haunting”. He has also recently read A repèl, by Huysmans, “wonderfully translated by Martí i Pol, and which inspired Gainsbourg’s alter ego, that dandy with a slightly vicious exquisite taste”.
He has re-read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes “mogollon” several times. His grandfather had a collection of very well bound books and inherited his respect for the object. His older brother, Armand, was a good reader (later he would be a translator, of The Hunger Games, 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 into novels. He is recovering the modern classics of Edhasa, and Guerau freaks out with Hesse (En Roc, we’ll see). Carabén has books from when he studied Political Science – the last year in France -, about music, cinema, his latest obsession has been David Milch. He is a fan of Vinyoli, Baudelaire, Auden.
He understands the library as “the way in which you ‘run it'”. It still preserves a chronologically ordered part, from the Bible, the Koran, Greek mythology and the Middle Ages to contemporaries. Below that are cookbooks and a shelf dedicated to malls. Another is dedicated to cool, a topic he talks about at 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. It happened to him with The fall of public man, by Richard Sennett, or with The closing of the modern mind, by Allan Bloom. He is no longer so passionate about it, but when his manager Gerardo Sanz gave him El maestro Juan Martínez que estaba allí, he bought all of Chaves Nogales’ books published in Libros del Asteroide.
He reads more digitally than he thought, and thus steals a few minutes on the subway or at the bowling alley, from the iPad, where the repertoire of songs is. On paper, he recovers the sensations of when he was a child: the calm, that the afternoon opens up for you and entering a state of flow.
In bookshops you buy an anticipation of all this, “I buy time”. He needs at least two hours to get into it, and sometimes he reads in the kitchen, because there is cross air from the bedroom to the corridor. Underline with a pencil, draw a star next to the passages you like. For a time he made chips. He still copies fragments that he revises from time to time and that inspire him.
They are different dispositions of the soul, he says. With a physical book, time passes more slowly, you get into it more, you concentrate more. And when you have digital digression so close at hand, reading is more superficial because you get lost in searches and references. He doesn’t despise it at all, on the contrary, he thinks it’s glorious: “It’s something we didn’t have, we didn’t jump from one book to another with the ease with which we do it now.”
