ABSTRACT
Who else has written of the death of Franco with such venomous enthusiasm? Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s ‘surrealist agony’, so closely entwined with his memories of Barcelona on that day in 1975, is as good a demonstration as any of the biting urban prose which has become his trademark. His own biography is etched into the walls, hills and asphalt of the city; his identity is indelibly marked by a life which began in 1939, the year in which Franco’s Nationalist forces entered Barcelona over the cordon of hills which ring the city. The legacy is in his prose: Vázquez Montalbán’s voluminous output stretches across bookshop shelves and column inches-20+ detective novels, poetry, treatises on politics, sociology, gastronomy, history, including his formidable ‘autobiography of General Franco’, and an account of his native city-Barcelonas-of remarkable fluency and vivacity, chronicles of a changing Spain, several published dialogues about the city’s urban politics, along with regular political columns for El País and other dailies. He watches, listens, writes. Cooks, eats and drinks. He is a flâneur, nose, memory. He is (was) a communist-now, as he puts it himself, a Grouchoist Marxist. Vázquez Montalbán-socialist botanist of the asphalt. In his works we can smell, see, taste the city and follow his psychogeographical wanderings and mental maps. And he is very
necessary. While most of the city’s intellectuals have achieved respect for their work in the clandestine opposition to the dictatorship, Vázquez Montalbán has gained his through his critique of the new Spanish democracy. While the 1992 Olympics focused eyes on a Barcelona, refashioned by the Catalanist social democrats of the PSC, and grouchy foreign journalists looking for an angle were quick to pick up on motifs of a dual city, he went deeper, far deeper, digging through his memories to evoke a soft city with very hard edges. These recollections-from childhood, from adolescence-would gather meaning through a life which included the standard imprisonments and beatings handed out to left-wing radicals, followed by the desencanto, disenchantment, of the reality of post-Francoist liberal democracy. By 1992 he had emerged as the city’s head cynic, as one of the few critical intellectuals who remained untouched by the PSC’s patronage or duties of office.
