For example: Gràcia

The memorable Ramon Solsona has just published El carrer de la xocolata (The Chocolate Street) (Proa), a memoir that is read with the same carefree pleasure with which children of my generation enjoyed sticker albums. Solsona was born in the Gràcia neighborhood in 1950, so he lived through a quarter of a century of Franco's regime and has lived through half a century of post-Francoism. Both eras are portrayed through detailed descriptions of their effects on daily life. Baby boomers who joined the dance in the sixties will find echoes that will still be familiar, especially if we had older siblings. Fellow citizens born in the first quarter of the 21st century will be able to read it as an anthropological tale that describes a previous civilization, more or less remote depending on each individual's family, linguistic, and life experience.

The narrative option Solsona chooses for memory is the inventory, a literary genre that precisely excludes invention. Each chapter focuses on a particular area (the house, the street, the school, the neighbors, the ancestors, the Lluïsos, music, the radio, advertisements...) and explores it through bifocals, which allow one to see both near and far. From very close up, the personal experiences of the four Solsona i Sancho siblings (Assumpta, Ramon, Carles, and Pep) always appear, and from further away, the collective experiences of their contemporaries, which sometimes coincide with their own and sometimes do not. The method includes preferential attention to lists (of objects, brands, stores) and the idioms of popular speech, with a host of non-normative expressions such as the "tórnins" in the game of marbles, with which, before throwing, the player would warn the opponents that the shot was a test and reserve the right to repeat it. The book is full of epoch-making linguistic delicacies, written with Solsona's usual grace.

The Gracia district would do well to translate Ramon Solsona's 'El carrer de la xocolata' into English.

The point of view is a blend of the Telerín family and Quico the Progressive. The style is reminiscent of Georges Perec's Les Choses , with the meaningful magnetism emanating from the objects of a mechanical and analog age, shaken by the noisy emergence of devices like the telephone, the television, the washing machine, the car... Affection permeates much of the story, but anger also emerges when necessary.

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The Barcelona that Solsona immortalizes is irrefutable proof of the capital's Catalan identity. The district of Gràcia would do well to subsidize the English translation of the twenty chapters of El carrer de la chocolate . It could then publish them in twenty booklets, like those pamphlets about this and that plastered on municipal centers, and distribute them among the growing expat population who flock to Gràcia in search of authenticity.