Barcino recovers 'El auca del señor Esteve': "one of the great novels of Barcelona"

BarcelonaThe quintessential bourgeois of Catalan literature was born at the beginning of the 20th century, when Santiago Rusiñol (Barcelona, ​​1861 - Aranjuez, 1931) adopted the popular expression "Señor Esteve" and turned it into a novel. Published in 1907, Mr. Esteve's Auca This story about a shopkeeper in Barcelona's Ribera district and his son Ramonet, who doesn't want to follow in the family footsteps but instead wants to become an artist, created both admirers and detractors. With the eponymous play, premiered in 1917, Esteve took the definitive leap and established himself as an undisputed protagonist of Catalan culture: the prototype of a sensible and thrifty man, bourgeois and conservative in spirit. That archetype remains alive more than a century later and has cemented the novel as an essential classic of our literature. Now, the Barcino publishing house has reissued it in the original language of the first publication, along with the rhyming couplets of Gabriel Alomar and the drawings of Ramon Casas, in an edition with an introduction by Margarida Casacuberta, professor and researcher of contemporary literature.

Mr. Esteve's Auca It's part of the canon and our collective imagination because it's read in schools. It enjoys a high degree of recognition, but at the same time, there's a lot of prejudice and cliché surrounding this work. Now is a good time to rediscover it,” argues Oriol Magrinyà, the editor at Barcino. The novel is part of the collection Essentials, alongside titles such as The wild potholes, by Raimon Casellas; The Gold Rush, by Narcís Oller, and Private lifeby José María de Sagarra. And, like these last two, the story of Mr. Esteve is a vivid and vibrant fresco of Barcelona. Specifically, of the transformation that the Catalan capital underwent with its modernization at the beginning of the 20th century. For this reason, both Magrinyà and Casacuberta champion it as "one of the great novels of Barcelona."

The story unfolds through the streets of Ciutat Vella to El Born and the Ciutadella, straddling nostalgia for a bygone era and enthusiasm for the modernization that arrives. "It recalls that Barcelona that rebelled, the riots, the republican Barcelona. Later it would become the more left-wing Barcelona, which is sometimes the one we forget the most," Casacuberta points out. Through Mr. Esteve, Rusiñol approaches the figure of the bourgeois with irony, but ultimately redeems him. "That was a moment of splendor for the bourgeois city, and behind the story, there's a feeling of pride in the city," the professor adds.

A rich and popular Catalan

One of the most striking elements of this new edition is the language Rusiñol uses to narrate the adventures of Mr. Esteve and his family. "It's the Catalan spoken in Barcelona at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. At a time when the purification of the language, driven by the Generation of '98, had begun, Rusiñol championed the most popular and traditional Catalan," explains Casacuberta. In this regard, Magrinyà details that the edition of the auca (a type of Catalan play) has opted to standardize the spelling while respecting and maintaining the vocabulary and Castilianisms. "There's a superficial aspect to the novel that draws on a specific vocabulary, with words like suit, haberdashery [pronounced in Spanish] and pass"That's why Casacuberta champions Rusiñol as an invaluable literary figure who, in his opinion, is sometimes undervalued: "It still carries clichés and stereotypes, and that's why we often don't take it seriously. With this edition, we are giving dignity to a work that, from time to time, should be remembered."