The 3 best books by Javier Pérez Andújar

Although it is not worth telling it in a literary blog, I want to point out that Javier Perez Andujar that atypical and strange Catalan. The stereotype of dysfunctional Catalan for pure Catalanism. That strange being that we observe surviving against the current in these turbulent days of nationalism prescribed as a placebo for all ills.

Atypical inasmuch as all Catalans who do not agree with uniformity (mental, cultural, sociological uniformity and any other area that one wants to imagine or suppose are so. Because surely, complying with Catalan canons, there are even those who fuck to the beat and cadence of the sardana).

But in the end the admirable creators are always those who are taciturn, critical, even melancholic. Because only from the critical notion of this supposed uniformity do the lucid minds that bear witness to the madness experienced end up surviving.

If someone is a good Catalan (or Spanish, of course), it will be to a greater extent someone who openly criticizes, who does not have to feel comfortable with a hymn, who does not like it or ignores certain cultural aspects, who does not You have to feel your hair stand on end with the current speech. The rest is about stupid subjects.

Pérez Andújar already told it on occasion when his father told him to approach someone at the bar to learn Catalan. Taking as a starting point for these days of imposition, he assures that now, as things are: «I will not be able to feel Catalan because I feel before the one who is approaching than the one who isIn other words, instrumentalization of the language, trying to eliminate everything else.

As if half of Catalonia were not so because they spoke Spanish, as if they themselves, the pure in heart and tongue, might not be so in the future because they did not know the Latin of the Romans. Yes, those who were there long before those with the star flag ...

Anyway, let's focus on Javier Pérez Andújar and in his work. Although sometimes both issues of current Catalanism and the Catalan citizen Javier Pérez Andújar intersect halfway between reality and fiction...

Top 3 recommended books by Javier Pérez Andújar

Walks with my mother

There are exceptional everyday things, worthy of being narrated. From the aroma of rain on the burning cement of summer to the dawn of the last day seen in the hospital bed.

This author moves in this range of possible sensations when he dedicates himself to this narration of short distances, clearly vivid and close. About what any of us was or lived, but ended up saying goodbye, as time pushes us forward in the ineffable queue of destiny.

This book is an exciting tribute to the building blocks that surround Barcelona, ​​and to which the city has turned its back. Through an autobiographical landscape, but interchangeable with that of all the cities of the world, the author discovers scenes of himself, and epic and moving stories.

To do this, he walks through its streets, the banks of the Besòs river and the beach at the foot of the thermal power plant, walking with his mother. He is met by the ghosts of former friends and neighbors, unemployment lines, the impact of the first commercial surfaces, concerts on soccer fields, neighborhood struggles and workers' strikes.

The conquests and defeats of a generation that came to Barcelona from a thousand places. Personal memory and chronicle of urgency with its beautiful alloy of humor and poetry, this book is also a settling of accounts and an investigation in search of an identity that, in the end, the author will discover in the voice of his mother.

The phenomenal night

When one reads, one also imagines the author indulging in the task of writing. It happens on occasions when you disconnect from the plot and run into the guy up there typing about your reading. It is a novel literary plane that arises on many more occasions with Javier Pérez Andujar.

Because it is Javier himself who, in a plot like this, atomized in a thousand characters and scenarios, occasionally slaps you in the face to make you look up and look at him. And that's when he asks you, do you know or don't you? And you can even have a laugh with him.

The team of a television program dedicated to paranormal phenomena discovers that anomalous events, hitherto never recorded, become reality in the same Barcelona from which it broadcasts.

At the same time, the city is hit seismically by the weather and by the sudden irruption of characters from another Barcelona, ​​who come to ask for help from the members of La noche fenomenal, which is what the program of this group of friends is called. .

Throughout this novel, at times hilarious, at times melancholic and at times philosophical, the narrator will introduce each member of the team. We will meet, among others, the director, bon vivant and determined to save the program from its disappearance; to De Diego, skeptical in everything except his faith in non-existent animals; the Chess Player, an ardent activist, with his unlit pipe between his teeth; to Paulina, an expert on disappeared civilizations, who is preparing a monograph on the oldest temple of humanity; Ro, the screenwriter and collector of flying saucer cases; to Hermosilla, editor of an esoteric magazine and faint-hearted about the important things in life...

This group of friends is accompanied from adventures to adventures by a long series of characters from a comic and tragic Barcelona, ​​sometimes possibly real and sometimes not too much, such as the narrator's mother, who has telepathic powers; the historic publisher and bookseller José Batlló; western novelist Carl Malone; the madrigalista del Clot, about whom everything is said and nothing is known, and perhaps the absolute protagonist of this story, a fragile girl who calls herself Isis, because she is not called Isabel.

Sometimes, in front of them and sometimes on their side, a mysterious retiree hooked on Andalusian rock, Mr. Comajuán, will guard each new border that these friends cross. It all starts when a drawing teacher discovers that he has become Walt Disney...

This is a novel of friendship and esotericism, unbridled, full of romanticism, quirky, fast-paced, crazy, poetic and very Barcelona. A distillate of high literary graduation that confirms Javier Pérez Andújar as one of the most surprising, hilarious, mestizo and free voices in our literature.

The mighty princes

Over time, all life becomes a novel. It's just a matter of letting some time go by to tackle the task with some perspective, nostalgia, and imagination.

In the best of cases, you can have a novel with which to compose an era, a much more complete context. If at the time you were insightful, observant and curious enough to take mental notes of what was all that was advancing with you.

Only the luckiest writers end up seasoning everything with that capacity that is useless for anything except writing, such as historical memory. That is, knowing exactly how the most insignificant anecdotes occurred, but which best enrich a narrative.

The river Besós on the outskirts of Barcelona, ​​Lieutenant Colombo, the collection of comics Joyas Literarias Juveniles, the Ice Sphinx by Jules Verne…, this book is a splendid evocation, full of humor, emotion and open poetry, of a place and a childhood: a city in the industrial belt of Barcelona in the seventies and a family of immigrants.

But it is at the same time a vibrant story of initiation to literature based on elements that appear to be a flood, such as comics, television series, newsstand books or adaptations of the classics.

Companion with his friend Ruiz de Hita, with whom he shares secrets and readings, the narrator recreates the classes of a former legionary teacher, the school gang, on Sundays with his uncle Ginés –prototype of the rogue–, the stories of a mother that speak to him of a rural past for him mythologized, the disturbing presence of Senora Umbelina, a public woman, or a Christmas night that had something of the end of an era.

On the horizon there are always the power lines towers, the chimneys of the thermal power plant, the highway bridge and, above all, the omnipresent river, with its symbolism and totemic load. But far from being the witnesses of an inclement time, that of the end of the Franco regime, all of them make up the mythologized scene of childhood readings.

Until the narrator himself also discovers his class condition, the political commitment of his elders, and proposes, through writing, that the heroism of the brave princes is not buried in the farewell of childhood.