The 10 literary trips for this summer

BarcelonaIf summer is "the promise that life can begin again", as Francis Scott Fitzgerald assured, a good way to accompany this restart can be reading. The good health of the Catalan publishing sector makes it possible for us to undertake a multitude of journeys – geographical and temporal – without leaving home. We select ten intrepid books that have arrived in Catalan bookstores in recent months.

Ancient Greece is the main setting of Homer's Odyssey, one of the first epic poems in the Western literary canon that has just been revisited in a cinematic key by Christopher Nolan. La Bernat Metge Universal presents a new translation of the classic, by Pau Sabaté, which narrates the journey of the heroic and cunning Odysseus (or Ulysses, depending on the version), after the Trojan War, with the aim of reaching the island of Ithaca, reuniting with his wife and son, Penelope and Telemachus, and reclaiming the throne. Composed and recited orally since the 9th century BC and fixed in writing during the 8th century BC, it is divided into 24 cantos and comprises over 12,000 hexameters, which Pau Sabaté has translated into verse and which address the life of the most human hero of all, who instead of aspiring to eternal glory on the battlefield prefers to return to his family, and on the way will have to trick the cyclops Polyphemus, will have to survive the song of the Sirens – who have the heads of women and bodies of birds – and will be tempted by Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso.

“When someone tells me they love me, the first thing I feel is fear,” assures Inju, the painter who dies in a suspicious car accident and whom we get to know through the eyes of her best friend, the playwright Lee Jeonghui. Ink and Blood, which, despite having been published in Korean in 2010, has not been translated into Catalan until now, is a mystery story that aims to unravel whether Inju's death was accidental or voluntary through the existentialist dilemmas of the characters, as suffering and restless as those in The Vegetarian, Human Acts, and The White Book, novels with which Han Kang (Gwangju, 1970) has gained readers worldwide before convincing the Nobel Prize jury, who decided to award her the world's most prestigious literary award in 2024 for "her intense poetic prose, which confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life".

While Carles Dachs is working on the first Catalan translation of Melancholy of Resistance for Cràter Edicions, one of the best novels by László Krasznahorkai (Gyula, 1954), Adan Kovacsics has taken on the challenge of translating into Spanish the only sentence of over 400 pages that makes up Herscht 07769, the Hungarian writer's penultimate novel. Its protagonist, the harmless and clairvoyant orphan Florian Herscht, lives in a small town in Thuringia obsessed with the imminent collapse of the universe, which he tries to warn about by letter to Angela Merkel, when she is still Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. The discovery of Bach's music will help him find the calm he seeks while awaiting an institutional response and a group of neo-Nazis settles in the municipality. Herscht 07769 is, to date, the most feverish-paced book by the latest Nobel Prize in Literature, known for his meticulous prose and for delving into the psychology of characters, often on the edge, to unsuspected extremes.

"A vast, risky, ambitious book": with these words defines Margaret AtwoodThe riddles, by Margaret Laurence (Neepawa, 1926-Lakefield, 1987), the Canadian writer revisits the town of Manakawa to tell the story of Morag Gunn, from when she loses her parents at five years old and is adopted by the garbage collector until the day, when she is already an adult, she can decide how she wants to live. In between are the years in Toronto, during which she marries an English literature professor who tries to dilute her vocation as a writer, and later her stay in England and Scotland, accompanied by the illegitimate daughter of a man with whom she had an affair. The riddles is a new success of Edicions del Periscopi when rediscovering a valuable literary voice, until now unpublished in Catalan, that speaks of class wounds, of how we learn to accept our ancestors, of writing as an act of self-knowledge and resistance, and of the need to feel loved.

The writer and pianist Jordi Masó (Granollers, 1967) flees the present in I Won't See This Anymore, nine stories set in oppressive or catastrophic near futures that play with genres such as science fiction, crime fiction, and satire through unique narrative devices, such as extracts from administrative reports, social media messages, establishment reviews, documentary script, or the dramatis personae of the characters involved in the plot. Masó, who has previously published books such as Polpa (2017), Winter in Corfu (2019), and Xacona (2023) – always with Males Herbes – is interested in this new collection in the capacity of some humans to regenerate bodily organs, in a system for adopting grandparents, and even in the atmosphere found in cyborg brothels.

"Nowadays, sailors are the only men who catch sight of exciting adventures, and those things which, to people sitting by the fireside, are strange and romantic, seem to these men as commonplace as an old coat," writes Herman Melville (New York, 1819-1891) in the preface to "Tapir, which feeds on the experiences lived in merchant ships and whalers in the South Seas between 20 and 25 years old. It was precisely after voluntarily leaving theAcushnet, where Melville ended up on the Polynesian island of Nuku Hiva: in Tapir –hitherto unpublished in Catalan– narrates the author's coexistence for several weeks among the indigenous people and the attempt to adapt to their atavistic customs, among which he hints at cannibalism. Published in 1846, when Melville was only 26 years old, it was the beginning of a literary career dazzling and controversial, which had as its peak Moby Dick (1851), although the novel's commercial and critical failure contributed to the author's decision to abandon narrative.

When, in 1993, Toni Morrison (Lorain, 1931 - New York, 2019) became the first African American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said her novels were “characterized by a visionary and poetic force,” through which she “recreated an essential aspect of American reality.” This aspect was the exploration of black identity in the United States and, in particular, the complex and traumatic experience of black women. One of the pinnacles of her work is Beloved, which Esther Tallada has translated for the first time into Catalan for La Segona Perifèria and which begins in a house in Cincinnati where in 1873 a mother and her teenage daughter, both survivors of a larger family, take shelter. The arrival of a man, Paul D., whom the mother had met many years before on a slave plantation in Kentucky, is the trigger for the memories of the past to assail them until they are forced to relive the hell they thought they had escaped from.

"Suddenly, the Dominican Republic has opened its doors to European exiles. They do not know what possibilities Santo Domingo offers them; they know, only, that it is America, and for that alone it is worth coming. If one does not prosper here, they will find a way to leave for another more generous country." This is how Vicenç Riera Llorca (Barcelona, 1903 - Pineda de Mar, 1991) explained the country where, fleeing from Franco's Spain, the protagonists of Tots tres surten per l'Ozama. The novel, which begins with the author's experience in the Dominican Republic in the 1940s, then led by another dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, describes a world marked by material misery, political corruption, racial prejudice, and passionate sensuality through the eyes of three men, who live precariously doing odd jobs and, surrounded by Dominicans and other exiles, strive to think little or not at all about the past and everything they have left behind.

A North American hunter named Hunter White, who has made a fortune investing in the stock market, buys the permit to hunt a black rhinoceros in Africa, the only piece missing from his trophy collection and which he intends to give to his wife. "She doesn't like Africa: she finds it too noisy and dusty, and it's too hot – we read in The trophy, by the Belgian Gaea Schoeters (Sint-Niklaas, 1976)–. But as it is the continent that hosts the best hunting grounds in the world, he has learned to respect it, and yes, even to love it against his instinct (...). For him, Africa is a great nature reserve created by God to please him; that people also live there, that they truly live there, is something he has never quite fully accepted, and even less has he been interested in their living conditions". The trophy, which has been translated into some twenty languages and was a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature, highlights colonial legacies through a disturbing narrative device, with characters of notable psychological and moral density.

Lea Ypi (Tirana, 1979) has spent three years rummaging through eight archives in five countries, turning over thousands of pages to reconstruct the life of her grandmother Leman. The result, Indignitat, is an exciting and striking puzzle that is read with the voracity of a thriller even though it addresses the author's family history. "My grandmother is dead, and I am a product of the system that destroyed her life," assures Ypi, a professor at the London School of Economics, who became known in 2023 with Libre (Anagrama), a book of memoirs and at the same time a sociopolitical reflection and historical essay. The system that the author analyzes in Indignitat is that of autarkic communist Albania and the police state of Enver Hoxha, the dictator who in his youth had been friends with Leman's husband and Lea's grandfather. During the journey that Indignitat explains, Ypi doubts the veracity of the memories she has of her grandmother from the insinuation that she could have been a fascist collaborator, communist, or, as she writes in the book, "even worse, both."