Ramon Solsona: "I have written a kind book, but I do not forgive Francoism a single thing"

BarcelonaRamon Solsona (Barcelona, ​​​​1950) explains that, as he gets older, he increasingly wants to remember. "We all tend to keep the good memories. With age, we want to look back in a serene, even indulgent way, devoid of acidity," stresses the writer of novels such as The hours stopped (1993) and The man with the suitcase (2011). This exercise with the past feeds the latest book, Chocolate street (Proa), a story made up of his memories and those of his brothers during childhood and youth. "The times were not great, and in fact I do not forgive Francoism at all, but I have written a pleasant and fun book because I wanted to remember what made me happy," says Solsona.

When defining Chocolate street, the writer compares it to a basket full of cherries. "When you pull one out, a lot of them come out. That's what has happened to me with my experiences, but it's also what I would like to convey to readers; that each cherry, each chapter, serves to build their own book of memories," says Solsona. Unlike the novels, in this case there is no narrative thread. Each chapter deals with a theme, ranging from childhood games - bullets, the Juegos Reunidos and all the adventures in the courtyards of the houses - to the arrival of the first television and visits from neighbours for various reasons.

The Solsona family - made up of the writer's parents, him and his three brothers - lived on Bellver Street in the Gràcia neighbourhood, popularly known as the street of chocolate because it had the Cola Cao factory very close. "I have friends who tell me that when they smell chocolate, they remember my street. Olfactory memory is very powerful," says Solsona, who remembers with nostalgia the neighbourhood life of that time. "As children, we went from one house to another. Sometimes people came to call because we had a telephone. We were very good neighbours. Now, however, when someone knocks on the door, we feel a mixture of strangeness and distrust," he adds.

A book of collective memories

Chocolate street It is written in the first person singular because it contains many of the memories that Solsona experienced firsthand, but also in the first person plural. With this stylistic gesture, the author encompasses the experiences that his siblings, Carlos, Pep and Asunta, have told him. "Before starting to write, I gave each of them a notebook and asked them to write down anecdotes. I remembered many things and I realized that my sister Assumpta lived with extra difficulties because she was a girl," says Solsona.

The author conceives Chocolate street as a book of individual memories, but also collective ones. In fact, the initial dedication says: "To our generation. Despite everything, we have come out quite normal." With this phrase Solsona refers above all to the restrictions of the postwar period and Francoism, but also to the weight of Catholicism and the Church in the lives of children. "There was that enfarfec, that obligation to go to mass. At school they never called us by our first name, always by our last name, and at high school we were a number," says the writer. However, Chocolate street He rescues the most pleasant moments of childhood in an entertaining way but with literary ambition. "I have not been able to play with words and what they convey. At home we used to say pharmacy Instead of a first aid kit, aisle "instead of a corridor, until the change of linguistic register occurred, from popular Catalan to standard Catalan," Solsona stresses. "Words have an extraordinary power of evocation."