Fictionalizing the Crisis: A Generational Tale in Barcelona’s Gràcia Neighborhood

Tuli Márquez (Barcelona, ​​1962) returns to the long crisis that began in 2008 in Around the worldnovel with which Reversal Editorial premieres his collection of Catalan fiction. The advertising creative Àlex Izquierdo is approaching 50 when he loses his job and becomes a job stinking. With Izquierdo’s revolt as the axis, Márquez builds a fiction with a generational and Barcelona spirit, or rather Graciense. “The crisis left many corpses,” says the writer. “It meant the fall of many people close to me and I wanted to explain it. It had a psychosomatic derivative: cancers, heart attacks, strokes began around me. And with the deficiencies came the Mister Hyde that we all have inside.”

Márquez himself suffered the effects of the crisis firsthand. He had been thinking about abandoning his promotion and marketing work in the television and music sectors for some time when suddenly “everyone turned off the tap and the work was over” in his orbit. It wasn’t him who left the job but the job left him.

Episodes experienced by the protagonist of Around the worldas get a job in civic centers through a SOC program for unemployed people of difficult age, Márquez lived them. But writing came to his aid. “I sacrificed everything to write and I think I did well,” he reflects. “Among other things, because I don’t intend to succeed, the only thing I intend to do is write, write and write until I run out of ideas.” Around the world It is his third work, after publishing The next day (2013) y The size of dwarfs (2019).

Not exactly friendly

The novel does not offer a portrait of the boomers precisely kind. “From the people I know, we are a generation of failures -considers Márquez-. Even the corrupt: they have had to steal from politics to have three wives and five children. On the other hand, there are many people who have had it all and have sent it all to hell. The only excuse we have is that we were not formed for the society in which we are living.where you have to do a lot of swimming and putting away your clothes, and we came out of Franco’s regime with the lily in our hands.

An apartment owned on Verdi Street prevents the publicist’s debacle from becoming greater. Although the son of Sant Gervasi, Márquez knows well Gràcia, a geography very present in Around the world. “It was my second home,” he says. “I lived in Sant Gervasi and the closest thing I had to go out at night was Gràcia. It is a neighborhood that has and above all had a welcoming idiosyncrasy. Older people and local squatters coexisted without conflict. I ended up living here. Now it is overoccupied because, with the rent of rooms, where three people used to live, six live. And from a certain hour, From Wednesday or Thursday, you almost have to ask permission to go down the street“.

The night sections of Around the worldnevertheless, The setting is Ciutat Vella and its bars and clubs.the territory of Javi, Àlex’s tarambana friend.

Smarter

Related news

A teenager is determining factor for the main character to begin to raise his head, at least professionally. “If we don’t believe in the generations that rise, we are dead,” says Márquez. “To spend all day questioning their things is nonsense. They did it to us and we cannot pay in the same coin. Do they have to do the same as us?” , those who were swept away by a crisis? By sum of tools, I think they are much smarter than us“.

The author tells in a rather clinical tone the story of Alex’s fall and battered recovery.. “I suppose it is a rebound effect of the Journalism that I studied in Information Sciences – he explains -, although later I chose the field of Advertising. I believe that journalism requires objectivity and should only explain facts. At least this is what they taught me, and I It seems very difficult.”