Colm Tóibín: "I always recommend Oriol Junqueras as an ideal tennis partner."

BarcelonaHe Colmo Tóibín who in 1975, having just turned 20, arrived in Barcelona "which was emerging from the calamities of dictatorship and repression" could not imagine that, half a century later, he would be such a popular author in Catalonia, that he would be received with all the honors by the mayor of the city, Jaume Collboni, and that he would become He is one of the writers chosen to represent the Catalan capital at this fall's Guadalajara Book Fair..

"I witnessed how the freedoms we associate with cosmopolitan life began to open their eyes and wake up in earnest, after a long and forced sleep," he recalls in the prologue written expressly this 2025 for the new edition ofTribute to Barcelona, published by Ara Llibres and Barcelona City Council (translated by Víctor Aldea and illustrated by Pau Gasol Valls). Born in Enniscorthy, in the southeast of Ireland, in 1955, Tóibín has maintained a close and constant relationship with Catalonia, where he has the habit of returning every summer. For some years now, his visits have often coincided with the publication of a new book. This year, in addition to recovering theTribute to Barcelona, has arrived Distant memory (Arcadia, 2025; translated by David Cuscó), a collection of essays that reconstruct episodes from his life and the environment in which he grew up.

One of the important differences between Barcelona in the mid-1970s and today is that it's a much more tourist-friendly city. In fact, it's one of the hotspots in the debate about what kind of city we want.

— If the people of Barcelona wanted to solve the problem, it would be easy [laughs]. They would just have to get a private company, with a stake in the city council, to buy all the buildings around the Sagrada Família and convert them into hotels and tourist apartments. On the ground floors, there would be bars named Olé and similar, restaurants serving lots of sangria... And anyone who wanted could visit Gaudí's expiatory temple or amuse themselves by looking at Subirachs' sculptures.

From the way he speaks, it doesn't seem like the Sagrada Família is one of his favorite places in Barcelona.

— On the contrary: I remember a very funny experience. It was in 1988, during a general strike. At that time I was in the middle of writingTribute to Barcelona and I called the Sagrada Família office to ask if I could talk about the operation of visits to the monument. They asked me to come on the day of the strike. I replied that it was fine. On the day in question there were many guards at the doors of the temple: they were ensuring that the reds They wouldn't attack him, as had happened in 1936. When they let me in, they asked me if I understood what it meant to say that the Sagrada Família was an expiatory temple. Being the good Catholic that I was, I said yes. Many sins were committed in the city! [Laughs] Now that Barcelona has become a global city, a temple like this is more necessary than ever, because everyone's sins must be atoned for...

"The city has changed. The city remains the same," begins the book's prologue. Why?

— First of all, it is a nod to The Leopard, by Lampedusa, which reads: "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything must change." But it's also a tribute to my partner. Whenever he comes to Barcelona in July, we make sure one of the days falls on a Sunday, because he loves visiting the Mercat de Sant Antoni. He goes to buy old French film magazines, and he's always surprised by some unexpected find... Sometimes, when we're there, I think time has stopped and I find myself back in the city of the 1970s: the books are stacked just as they were before, and even the looks of today's collectors resemble those. I can also take these kinds of trips in one of those old, dimly lit Barcelona apartments, filled with papers and antique furniture. And in the shadows cast by the trees on certain streets. Or in the way the swifts fly overhead in April.

No detail is missed.

— While working with Montse Ingla, editor of Distant memoryHe took me to some genuinely Catalan restaurants in the Eixample district. Most of the diners were from there. It was easy to imagine his parents and grandparents eating at the same places. There's an extraordinary continuity in Catalan culture.

I found this continuity when reading some of the texts included in Distant memory in relation to Ireland.

— It was a different continuity, more related to power. When I was little, my father was involved with the Catholic Church. He raised funds for the Church, became good friends with priests who came to our house... And he got involved in a political party similar to Convergència i Unió: nationalist, bourgeois, conservative, and Catholic. I remember that, in the 1964 elections, he gave me stacks of propaganda leaflets to distribute. Five years later, the party's message was that we had to stop the socialists no matter what! [Laughs] When I went to study in Dublin, I didn't come thinking I was from a small place. Dublin was part of our country.

Your father was a writer, and you describe how you watched him, spellbound, as he worked. And your mother was a very good reader: hidden high in a cupboard were books by Edna O'Brien and John McGahern.

— There was a continuity that wasn't just cultural, but also political. My grandfather had fought for Irish independence. And our side had won. I grew up surrounded by that pride, which had nothing to do with being rich, but rather with the realization that I had received a valuable cultural heritage, perhaps similar to what Pasqual Maragall or Jordi Pujol received from their families in their time.

What caught your attention most about the Barcelona you saw in 1975?

— The September heat here is unthinkable in Ireland. In Barcelona, I discovered that you can sweat down the back of your spine. I found it mind-blowing. Another thing that surprised me was the rotten smell that permeated many places in the city, which I still find very appealing. There was also one last detail that shouldn't be overlooked: alcohol was incredibly cheap.

It must have been crucial for a 20-year-old.

— It was very difficult to stay sober with those prices. In Ireland, alcohol taxes were sky-high, especially on spirits. But wine was also sky-high: at home, we only opened a bottle at Christmas.

Was Barcelona then a city where homosexuality was lived out behind closed doors?

— In 1975, there were rumors that there was a gay bar in Barcelona, ​​but they kept changing. One day they'd say it was the Café de la Ópera, another the Drugstore on Passeig de Gràcia, or a very small place next to the Liceu... I lived in a wonderful Barcelona, ​​perhaps the best in the world. You could get lost in the streets of Ciutat Vella. In Escudellers or one of the alleys leading off, you'd run into someone you liked and turn around to look at them. Sometimes you were lucky enough to find the other person turning around too, and you'd say, "Where are you going?" This could be the start of something. It's worth remembering that we're talking about Barcelona in 1975. No one was taking heroin. No one had even heard of AIDS yet. And the dictatorship wasn't an obstacle to doing anything.

No?

— The grays never went below Canaletes. The people of Barcelona had been leaving the dictatorship behind for some time. Although they didn't grow their hair long until after Franco's death, mentally they had already let it grow.

In one of the stories of Mothers and children explains how he came into contact with the libertarian environment around Ocaña.

— In Barcelona, I lived three parallel lives. The first, as an English teacher. The second, as a member of a group of friends who were serious Catalan nationalists. The second, in a circle of friends who only had their homosexuality in common. It was a world where you could disappear for a while and no one would notice.

Tribute to Barcelona arrived, in English, in 1990, the same year of his debut as a novelist, with The south (The South). How was it received?

— There were very few reviews. The one that bothered me the most was fromIan Gibson: He reproached me for not writing about Madrid, instead of Barcelona. But come on, he should be happy, because he dedicated a space... Two years later, Robert Hughes published Barcelona, an impressive essay, and I had the pleasure of reviewing it for the Washington PostI wrote that it was the only great book that existed about the city, that is, I was the first to put mine aside.

As a novelist, things went much better for him.

— If I hadn't published novels, my life would have been very different. And books like Tribute to Barcelona They would never have been translated. It was first published in Catalan in 2003, but it hasn't been published in Spanish until now. It's no coincidence that it's being published by a Catalan publisher. In Spain, there isn't much interest in what I do. They're publishing me, albeit with moderate impact.

Between the first Catalan edition ofTribute to Barcelona And a lot has happened in the country now. For example, the independence process. How did you experience it?

— It's very difficult to explain. To reach a conclusion, you would have to go over day by day everything that happened up until the declaration of independence and what each of the politicians did. The fact is that they were all completely rational people who, at a certain point, came together to do something that wouldn't succeed and would be very damaging to them personally. Furthermore, it would set things back a generation. It's a mystery how the independence process in Catalonia prospered. A couple of years ago, I was in Llavorsí, playing tennis. We were playing doubles with friends when a man appeared and someone asked him if he wanted to play. He and I teamed up. Do you know who he was?

No.

— Oriol Junqueras.

And they won?

— Yes. Neither of us is a genius, but we don't make mistakes. We're resilient. And let's be very careful. He's fitter than he looks. I always recommend him as an ideal tennis partner. While we were playing, he made a comment to me that I don't know if it was true or not, but it absolutely blew me away. He said, "I've improved a lot since I was in prison." It's mind-boggling that someone like him spent time behind bars. I'm shocked. And everyone I've spoken to thinks the same.

In the summer, we can find him in Pallars, but during the year, he spends a semester in New York, where he teaches at Columbia University, and the rest of the year, he's in Los Angeles and Dublin. He has the gift of ubiquity!

— I don't go to Dublin much anymore. The last few seasons I spent were when I was named Laureate for Irish Fiction, between 2022 and 2024, and then I would concentrate on library events for a few days. This past year I've spent the entire time in Los Angeles. I took a sabbatical and it's been very quiet. My partner, Hedi [El Kholty], is an editor. We both work from home. We leave the doors open, so we can see each other from our offices. We work long hours every day. We work in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. And sometimes after dinner too. He'd want to watch a movie, but I wouldn't, and I'd go back to the office. If he asks me what I'm doing, I always say the same thing: a novel. It's a perfect excuse to avoid telling him what I'm thinking about, really! [laughs]

Will you return to Columbia?

— Yes, in January. I'm doing a seminar on theUlysses of JoyceI love rereading this novel. It's one of life's great pleasures. I find it a beautifully written book, full of details, connections, and repetitions. It's one of the most exciting things that has happened to me in the last 20 years.

He has dedicated essays to the poet Elizabeth Bishop (Where Elizabeth Bishop; Princeton University Press, 2015) and novelist James Baldwin (Where James Baldwin; Brandeis University Press, 2024). Will you write one about Joyce?

— In September I will publish a book that collects all the notes I made about theUlysses by Joyce when he was Laureate. There are quite a few.

In Distant memory has included some dedicated to other topics.

— Distant memory It is a unique book because it does not exist in any other language.

It gives us a glimpse into the innermost Colm Tóibín. I didn't know his family bought Enniscorthy Castle and opened a museum there.

— I had spoken about it in a fictional key in one of my first novels, The Heather Blazing [1992]. But it is true that there was no text on the subject in an autobiographical key.

He also talks about being raised in a religious school. One of his teachers, Mr. Dunn, was fed up with his witty comebacks and odd observations. Have they gotten worse over the years?

— Without a doubt. I'd love to have Mr. Dunn in front of me again so he could reproach me with that. The big difference between seeds and now is that I feel free.