the flavour of reading

ISABEL OLESTI, dancer, writer, cultural manager, mother and student of Humanities degree

“My grandfather was an artist and a literate. He was able to play the piano, work with leather or be an engraver. He could do all sort of creative activities and when I was a child I was left fascinated by this world. At home I always lived in a cultural ambience”.

Isabel Olesti was born in Reus in the April of 1957. She was a professional dancer till 1995. “My mother and my ant had a school for dancers. It was never questioned what I will dedicate my life to, it was decided that I was going to dance. I started with the classic style, until I discovered contemporary dancing; it was like discovering a whole new world which took place in all my life”.

The interest in reading awoke the curiosity for writing. At the age of 29, she delivered a book to a literary contest and she won the first prize. That’s what encouraged her to keep on with literature. A year after, she already had a collection of stories that gave her the prize Andròmina in 1998.

“At home, I still lived in that artistic atmosphere full of books and music. One day I tried writing a little story and I loved it. Without realizing it, after a little time I had a full book filled with little stories titled Desfici. Good chance made me won some prizes and in my thirties I started changing the dancing for the writing”.

She left the world of dance at all, but she claims that she will always be a dancer, “The feeling of dancing up in the stage is something you go with forever. I quit it without being aware of it, I started surrounding myself with writers and suddenly I lived in a literary world. My husband is a translator, he was a poet, he runs a bookshop and has edited books. Even though when I see someone dancing, I can feel what she or he is feeling, but for writing I just need myself and a computer. Writing is innermost, easier, I need it, is thrilling and I feel comfortable doing it. I write for myself not for the reader”.

In 1989 she travelled to New York and started writing color pieces and opinion features for different newspapers. She claims that travelling has been deeply important for her writing. “I always have a restlessness inside that makes me curious and leads me to travel to know what goes on far away from home”.

This is just one of the many things from where she gets the ideas for her novels. “You can find a book from a character, a picture, a trip, a home... Sometimes I base my books in real stories I want to write about, most of the times I have no idea how to start or what exactly I want to say. I am so slow at writing… and I have no methodology. I’m not one of those who write every day, I can see months passing by and stay without writing; and I know it shouldn’t be like that. I love writing and let it rest. Like when you prepare bread and wait for it to raise, the text rises in a special way. Then is when I have another look to it, I see what I like and dislike. If you read your texts every day, you get used to it and they sound good to you, just time gives me the perspective to know what I don’t like and change it”.

Isabel Olesti has written all kinds of narrative: little stories by herself, cooperating with other writers, novels and biographies in the book Nou dones i una guerra: les dones del 36 (Nine women and a war: women from the 36). Furthermore she works as a cultural manager and organizes cultural festivals and literature meetings. The style in her books explores various forms of expression and they are characterized by an special descriptive capacity that generates atmospheres using the five senses.

Before her last book La pell de l’aigua, 2012 (The skin of water) she spent seven years without publishing any book. She seems surprised when she realizes the pass of time. “Well… at first I had accumulated stories, my books used to overlap. When I published one, I already had another almost done. When I lived alone was when I wrote the best. Since I have a couple and, most of all, my children, it has been much difficult. In addition, when they are young you are on cloud nine because of everything that’s happening to you and you feel like everything is fantastic and surprising… The truth is that when you are actually really happy, writing is harder. I feel like we write because we have needs, desires, anxieties and questions. When you feel like travelling in an air balloon, writing is needless. I even believe the result would be mediocre. Literature is not made by someone immensely happy. If everything is going perfectly, why are you wirting? Live your life!”

You will never read something actually new, just the same old stories with new appearances. The search of the treasure, the way back home, revenge, forbidden love, the pursuit of power, the hidden part of the human being, the creation of a new nation, a pact with the devil, the self-awareness… Jordi Batlló and Xavier Perez present in the book The immortal seed (La llavor immortal, 1995) twenty one topics that have been repeating themselves all over the whole cinema and literature history.

What they do is to show an example of classical literature to illustrate each subject. The themes have been created along the evolution of writing and dramaturgy. From Ancient Greece to Shakespeare or Kafta, some universal stories were written for the first time, only to be recreated later by films and books with new forms, styles, ideas, concepts or emotions.

After presenting the topic and the initial example, the authors collect posterior adaptations of it. From Madame Bovery to Anna Karenina, Macbeth and The Godfather, The Odyssey with Robin Hood and Taxi Driver. They do not see this theory as a limitation but as a challenge: a creator needs the ability to explain the same things we have always been told in an original way. Recover those immortal ideas that have been chained and multiplied all over the history of literature and produce something new and surprising.

The authors actually refer to films, but they expose that almost the totality of the cinematographic productions are adaptations of books. After going through the pages of this essay, parallelisms between books and stories become uncovered, and the immortal seed is distinguishable. When finding something that surprises you in a book, the new shape that the writer has been able to give to this already known story is even more fascinating. 

Karen Blixen was a Danish writer. She was a baroness and wrote in a late romantic style, practised painting and created her stories in an aristocratic ambience in the after Second World War North. 

Brought out five years after her big success with Out of Africa, the book Winter’s Tales is a collection of little stories, all of them located in the northern countries in Europe. Published in 1942 under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen, it was the book that received the best critics from the Danish, who were pleased to see their country and traditions reflected in the works of their artists.

The title of the book comes from the Shakespeare’s play with the same name and a quote from it inspired the author: “A sad story is best for winter”. The link between the eleven tales in the book is the sadness from non-accomplished desires and the impossible longing.

When going through the pages of these little sotries, you can’t help but imagine Karen Blixen’s tough situation. After being part of the upper class society, she had to write for money using a male’s name in order to get recognition for her work, as only literature created by men was considered.

In 1902, Catarina Albert, using the penname Víctor Català, published in Catalan Drames rurals (Rural Tragic Stories). Harsh landscapes which determine the characters, the importance of fate and the resignation to it is what connects the two collections of stories. The shocking parallelism can also be found between both writers’ lives.

In Denmark, while reading her tales, you could feel the cold, the snow and the thoughts of the characters. Descriptions are constant in Blixen’s literature. People in her books are full of contradictions, and myths and destiny take the reader to an unexpected world easily accepted by the characters.

Written in third person, the omniscient narrator just describes everything in the scenes to transport you into the characters’ world. Their deep thinking gets to be palpable when walking around Denmark’s forests. 

Carla Gràcia worked in her first novel Set dies de Gràcia for five years, a whole one of them isolated in an individual room in a little village at the Pyrenees. When she grabbed, finished, edited and published the book, she felt disappointed. “I had lived in that world for so long, so many years, that that world became so big and so real… when I had the novel in my hands, it was limited as just an object”.

It all started a day she took a taxi heading the district of Gràcia in Barcelona. The driver commented on the fact that in the street where they were passing through, the dignity of a town had been at stake during the revolt of 1870 between Barcelona and the independent village of Gràcia. Carla says that when she got home and started investigating she discovered the legend of a woman who had spent three days and three nights ringing the bell of Gracia’s tower to maintain the revolution alive.

Struck by this woman’s story, Carla Gràcia needed three years to get documented and two more till she decided the novel was ended. Last March it was published and in April it won a prize awarded by readers and given by Òmnium Cultural, the 2014 Premi Llança.

“Having the book published is a shocking change”, she says, “My life as a writer is an interior life: closed with myself, waking up, having breakfast, writing, meditating, walking around the nature and writing again. When the book was finished, I had to promote it, talking to lots of people and putting my heart and all I had felt in front of others”.

Before being shuttered to write during a whole year, Carla had worked as a community manager for big companies. The change of life came when, even she liked her job, she thought that it was something everybody could do, but no one else could write her novel.

The bases for this enormous life change were set when she was around the world. “I was travelling for my job and then, I learned the little we are, how big the universe is and how many types of lives can exist. Here, we are all supposed to have a job, a partner, a mortgage, children… When I was at Laos, at 5 pm, half of the citizens just sat down for a while to see the setting sun above Mekong River”. When she came back, she had discovered so many possibilities that she could not continue doing her previous job, she tried to work on social economic companies, but it didn’t work either. She ended up quitting her job because she felt she needed to finish her novel. “Imagine you could wake up every day just to write, that’s what my novel has given me”.

Literature is a way to understand the world. Life goes on really fast, so fast sometimes we don’t even realize it. Reading and writing allows people to stop, breathe and think.

We all have desires and wishes that may never come true. When writing, the whole reality rests within your hands and anything can become possible. In the world of stories, the writer is the owner who possesses the magic to create the future, according to her pleasure. He has the power to fulfil the blank space with his ideas.

Reading makes you able to hide and dream easily, to be moved by stories that will never hurt you and to believe that anything can happen. Writing is a bigger shelter which gives you the ability to turn the impossible into reality, the power of building a whole world that fits you. A world where you can keep all your memories, emotions, secrets and experiences.

Sometimes the writer needs her own world, a place to put and take all she wants, to have everything under control. Often, he fills it with narratives and delusions, desires, dreams and smiles, with secrets he doesn’t even know. She likes to explain it all through stories, with the power of omniscience.

I believe that’s why people write. The fascinating energy that moves people to become writers gives the key and the push to write about writing. The intention to share the passion someone felt when reading or writing, bonded to the uniqueness of whom writes or reads.

Confessions, a book by Jaume Cabré, has been presented in English this week. The Catalan work was published in 2011 and it has already been released in Italian, German, Spanish, French, Dutch and Polish. It is agreed that the novel will be brought out in 20 languages in the following months. Last February the book won the Courrier International Prize for “Best foreign book” and was expected to be translated in English in 2015 by Mara Faye Lethem, but Confessions  has been ready in advance.

The book, framed as a letter, is a reflection of evil through infinite time jumps and lots of symbolism. The main character, a boy born after the Spanish Civil War who lives in Barcelona, writes a letter in which he presents his whole life and his deeper thoughts. Jaume Cabré is able to expose mankind’s ability to do wrong, from the Spanish Inquisition to the dehumanization of the Nazism period. “When I start, I never know where the novel and the characters will take me”, Cabré said once in an interview. In this occasion, they have taken him to seven centuries of European history and evil prevailing at all times.

The writer has an original narrative technique which transports the reader from one time and space to another in the middle of a sentence and the relocation happens smoothly. From his first novel to his last one, he has gradually increased the quantity of time jumps. In Confessions sudden changes in time are a continuum.  It strongly differs from the best seller stereotype, but Jaume Cabré’s books achieve thousands of sales. The stories catch the readers thus it is not always easy to put the book down.