In person, Zadie Smith (London, 1975) has as much character as the protagonists of her novels. For years, the author of novels such as White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) –in Catalan at La Magrana– has combined fiction with essays, and this week she visited Barcelona to present her latest and lush collection of non-fiction texts, Feel Free (Jande/Salamandra; translated into Catalan by Elena Ordeig Vila). In it, she recovers articles published in the press, prologues, award acceptance speeches, and some unpublished pieces where she combines autobiographical notes with burning issues of current affairs, such as mobile phone addiction and the resurgence of racism. Smith, who shared a conversation about beauty at the CCCB with the writer Édouard Louis, regrets having agreed to give interviews after having had a rough night. Perhaps that is why her answers are brief, although they cannot help but contain, in essence, a sample of the novelist's intelligence.

A couple of decades ago, Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) published Who Are We? The Challenges of American National Identity (2004). This is a book that anticipated or foreshadowed the Trump era long before it was even hinted at as a political possibility. From the American collective imagination – not necessarily conservative, nor affiliated only with the Republican Party – the essay could be seen as little or not at all alarming. Except for some risqué allusions to the subject of Mexican immigration, and also certain maximalist assessments of the supposed social decomposition of the sixties, the book did not diverge too much from the standardized ideas of the average American. In Europe, on the other hand, Huntington's text caused a certain stupor. The naturalness with which religious sentiment was juxtaposed with American national identity, for example, returned the average European reader to times that we consider outdated.