Happy coincidence: the two best-selling books for Sant Jordi share the fact of being written with a lot of humor. The fiction of Crispetes de matinada is a wisely administered festival of hilarious situations, conversations, and thoughts, and the non-fiction of Manual de defensa del català (yes, unfortunately, it is non-fiction) is presented to readers with humor that acts like the mustard and ketchup that make a shoe-sole-type hamburger digestible.
So Regina Rodríguez Sirvent and Òscar Andreu keep high one of the traditionally high pillars of Catalan culture, which is the sense of humor that makes you laugh by saying very serious things. And both also share the fact of belonging to families where Spanish has been present at home but it has been in Catalan that they have written and said what they wanted to say.
One is written from the happiness that is possible to find (provided we don't expect the delivery person to bring it to us) and to the other we must be grateful for making us feel accompanied, but not in sentiment, but rather, on the contrary, remembering what Pere Calders used to say and which he collects: “I haven't seen pessimism serve any purpose [...], pessimism is absolutely useless and, on the other hand, I know for a fact that optimism has served to save a bunch of situations”. If we add to this positive spirit the cry for Catalan from Carme Junyent (“Speak it!”), all that will be missing are the necessary economic resources for all those new citizens who are queuing these days to get their papers to join Catalan. We are going from the “Hispanic-Catalan city” that Raimon sang about to the Hispanic-American-Catalan city that we are now. The work is immense.
