A few months ago I attended a very instructive conversation between Borja de Riquer (Barcelona, ​​1945) and Andreu Claret (Acs, France, 1946) about history and the novel. The historian – said Riquer – doesn’t just reconstruct the past: he explains, analyzes and interprets so that people today can understand things. Being a historian is a profession that is not only learned by reading: you have to research. Memories – he added – are not history. And you have to be careful because they always have an ideological bias.
Claret, who is a very intelligent man with great experience in different fields (he has been a delegate of the Efe Agency in Africa and Central America, a contributor to newspapers and radio programs and director of the Catalan Institute of the Mediterranean) defended that the function of the historical novel is to teach and make people dream. As Manzoni said: the writer must restore the flesh on the skeleton of the story. Being an honest man, he also quoted Ortega y Gasset with an easy-to-share idea: the historical novel does not satisfy literature or history. Especially – I add now – since it has become a best-seller genre.
With the Manzonian idea in mind, Claret has written three novels set in the time of war, about the international brigades (El secret del brigadista, 2008), about the Soviet intervention in republican Catalonia (The Consul of Barcelona, 2019) and The Fall of Barcelona (2021). That the word Barcelona appears in two out of three titles is significant. The Barcelona history bestseller is an important subgenre.
What does Claret mean when he talks about restoring the flesh to the bones of history? The entire first part of Paris was us tells the story of a young man from Suria who learns the trade of carpenter and enters the world of politics. There is an ideological position, it is clear – given the case of many families in the Cardener valley ruined by phylloxera and subjected to abuse by manufacturers. But the key is material, worldly objects. In order to be independent from his parents and see the world, the protagonist has two items that would not appear in a history book: a pool cue and a Zündapp motorcycle (later changed to a Rudge-Whitworth). Since he is a great pool player, he is called to casinos here and there, since he has a good motorcycle he can go there. Thanks to the taco and the motorcycle, he meets LluÃs Companys and all his experience of seeing people suffer takes shape in a political action. His friends (El Malcarat, el Quico, el Pèsol) represent the working class of action, the ugly working class (which will lead to Francoism) and Catalanism. Were these three friends supposed to exist? I don’t know But the novelist does well to show the disjunctions between which he moved… his father.
The novel – and this is the novelty – reconstructs the life of Andreu Claret Casadesús (1908-2005), the author’s father, who played a fundamental role in stopping the debauchery of La Fatarella (when a group of FAI militiamen shot thirty-four farmers who did not want their land collectivized) and that he actively participated in the clandestine exile. In France and Andorra he led an adventurous life: he worked in a circus, made money with some forests in Occitanie, went broke and became the Snowman in the Port of Envalira. Porcioles asked him to take down the snow plows in Barcelona after the snowfall of 1962. Here, before “his pride” (Claret dixit), ends the story which, along the way, has been losing novelistic elements, fictional reconstructions, forced stories, to stay in the skin and bones, no of history but of the son’s memory in relation to the father, with whom he did not quite fit. This most stripped-down part is the most interesting, Claret gets involved emotionally and sentimentally, there is conflict and narrative edge.
