Something To Remind You: Books

It was St. George’s Day on Saturday. Sant Jordi’s day. It was also the day of the book and of the curious ritual of exchanging a rose for a book. What happens nowadays? Do Interflora and Amazon both deliver?

The personal may be being taken out of many aspects of life, the Kindle and the iPad may be assuming greater significance, but the book itself endures. Rather like vinyl, the book is more substantial, more tangible than a disc or the physically non-existent, the download. It is more personal.

In Palma, they celebrated book day. Politicians took the opportunity to celebrate some time as last men and women standing. Before they succumb to their probable fate in May, the regional president and the mayor of Palma were among the visitors.  Antich was talking a good book, or was he a talking book? The next legislature will introduce initiatives to develop reading, so he said. The education minister was on hand to echo this and to insist that it was necessary to give strength to plans for reading development. What have they been doing for the past four years?

Reading, sales of books, financial assistance for parental purchase of books; these all crop up among the statistics that are regularly trotted out in the press. More than literature, Mallorca has been creating a generation that can read figures rather than prose. The attention that is paid to reading does, though, emphasise the role of the book in local society.

But this same society has been bemoaning standards. Last September, at the literary gathering in Formentor of book publishers, concern was expressed at the fact that children no longer had the “experience of the book”. Public education is sub-standard enough for it to have been admitted that, while children read, if not as much as they might, they don’t understand. Levels of comprehension in Mallorca and the Balearics, along with other core benchmarks in education, are below those of the Spanish average and well below those of Europe as a whole.

Despite a tradition of the book and literature, Mallorca has produced little by way of great works. Not on an international scale, at any rate. Yet, the island can lay claim to being the birthplace of the European novel. Ramon Llull’s “Blanquerna”, written in the thirteenth century, is often held up as the first of its kind. It was written in Catalan, emphasising the importance of the language in civilising mediaeval European society, something that is conveniently overlooked by many.

There was a mere gap of some 700 years before something approximating to a great work about Mallorca came along, Llorenç Villalonga’s “Bearn” about the fall of the Mallorcan nobility. But for most people outside Mallorca, both it and Llull’s work are obscure and generally ignored. A more recent Mallorcan literary tradition hasn’t been one at all, but a foreign invasion of Peter Mayle-apeing pap.

For the visitor, Mallorca and books mean not the unknowns such as Villalonga, but what gets thrown into the suitcase. Holidays are reading time; for many, the only time they read a book. New technologies may spawn greater interest in reading, but the Kindle is still subject to the same drawbacks as the book on holiday: Ambre Solaire thumbmarks and grains of sand working themselves into the crevices.

The book on holiday can take on greater significance than merely a means of whiling away some hours on a beach or by the poolside. It is a remembrance, something to remind you. I know exactly where I was when I read William Trevor’s gut-wrenchingly sad “The Story of Lucy Gault” or when I laughed hysterically at the insanely irreverent “Henry Root Letters”.

Both are somewhere, among all the other books, the old copies of “Wisden”, the Ian McEwan first editions, the translation of the bible for the Inquisition, the “Malleus Maleficarum”. These are my own descendants of what I grew up among – Hemingway, Dickens and the less cerebral Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins.

The day of the book is a fine idea. There should be more of them. If only as a reminder of the greater aesthetic of the book. It can be read, but it can also be seen as a single object and even smelt. The new technologies don’t offer the same pleasure and appeal to the senses.

In years to come, will the day of the book become the day of the electronic book? Stalls of handheld devices? Will the exchange of gifts mean a rose for a Kindle? I very much doubt it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Read You Like A Book: Literature, culture and technology

A week or so ago there was some navel-gazing going on. It was at a literary gathering known as Conversaciones de Formentor. Book publishers, Spanish and Mallorcan, were bemoaning what they see as the impoverishment of culture and lack of demand for more serious literature.

Books and their reading do not escape the obsessiveness with which statistics are presented on almost every aspect of Mallorcan life. Suffice it to say that reading is down, this in a wider Catalan society that can produce something as massive as the Sunday book market in Barcelona. There are all sorts of explanations as to why, one of them being media companies which contribute to what the publishers perceive as the increasing banality of local culture.

The publishers accept that new technologies can be enriching, but they worry – as many others worry – about children not growing up being “imbued with the experience of the book”. But are they right to be so concerned? They might be right in being uneasy at the proliferation of the inane, an X Factor winner’s fascinating autobiography for example, but technology might actually be the saviour of the book – serious or otherwise – and of children’s (and adults’) reading. At least this is what Amazon and Apple would like us to believe. When the publishers argue that “educational reform should not be limited to facilitating children’s use of a computer”, they overlook the potentially powerful symbiosis between technology and literature.

A recent book, assuming anyone’s read it, has advanced the theory that the internet is changing the way we think. Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” has provoked a debate as it argues that the net has altered how we read and use our memories. Carr himself has said that “the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”. I can sympathise, when it comes to reading online. A mistake newspaper publishers are making in hoping for a mass migration to paid-for online newspapers is that they neglect the distractions of the internet. You can be reading something and suddenly the urge takes you elsewhere. Where do you want to go today? Why pay for something if you realise you’re not going to read it?

Apple, with its iPad, offers a potentially whole brave new world for book reading. The iBooks application is but one part of the iPad, which, by coincidence or perhaps by design, an official video from the company described as feeling right “in the same way it just feels right to hold a book or magazine or newspaper”. But the iPad is sold on the basis of its multiple applications; the distractions to go somewhere else, other than the book, are enormous. Amazon’s Kindle is more straightforward. A promo video for the latest Kindle features a far from unattractive young lady sitting on a deckchair on a sunny beach, tucking into what may or may not be Jane Austen. Go anywhere, download anywhere, read anywhere is a seductive argument, but just how popular is it? Amazon claims millions of sales; an independent estimate suggests they are not as strong as the company would have them. Nevertheless, there may be more than just wishful thinking to Amazon’s advertising which portrays the product’s coolness for youngsters and for those who had never previously read a book.

But you still come back to the banality that the publishers were complaining about. The iPad or any computer hooked up to the internet doesn’t overcome the greatest banalities of all – those sometimes perpetrated in the name of social networking via the likes of Facebook, recently described by the president of the Balearics’ division of the Spanish consumers assocation FACUA as – and I am quoting him out of context – “the greatest evil that has been invented in the world”. It isn’t that (he was specifically referring to some more unpleasant aspects of Facebook), but it does contribute to a growing sense of abbreviated communication, part of a wider issue of a failure to concentrate, which is the product of what Carr is saying.

Mallorcan literary heritage is hardly a thing of international acclaim, but book reading locally has long been taken seriously. Whether what is being read is serious or not, if the publishers are concerned as to a decline in reading (and the statistics would bear this out), then they should perhaps be embracing, if they haven’t already, the new technologies. Whether these really work though is still very much an unanswered question.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

How We Got Here: Mallorca and literature

Before the unexpected scorched earth policy a few days ago abruptly interrupted my train of thought, I had been reflecting – as you do while lying on the beach – on Great Works. My companion, literary-wise, was Jonathan Meades, a favourite of mine, as some of you will know, as he has been name-checked here more than once. Though not for the faint-hearted or for one disinclined to drag a dictionary and thesaurus to the beach, I had come across an old essay by Meades in which it was possible to decipher the names of great authors in the English language. It was these, the manufacturers of Great Works, which began to make me wonder.

Mallorca, and don’t we just keep being reminded of it, proclaims a prodigious cultural heritage, one exaggerated often enough that we might start to believe it to be so. The poetry of the island might be said to support a literary culture, but it is parochial, a tradition continued via the pompous poetic introductions to most local fiesta brochures. And one says pompous, assuming anyone other than a local can understand them. Mallorcan poetry does not cross linguistic barriers. Indeed within the island’s whole literary oeuvre, few names, let alone their works, have crossed into anything like a wider consciousness. And of these, one, Ramon Llull, was born almost 800 years ago. With one or two exceptions, such as Llorenç Villalonga who probably does deserve wider recognition for his twentieth-century novel on the decline of the Mallorcan nobility, one great author every millennium or so doesn’t exactly constitute a rich tradition.

The literary heritage, and indeed other aspects of the arts culture of Mallorca, owes as much to non-Mallorcans as it does to those native to the island. But even here, it is a heritage by association as much as it is by work that is Mallorcan by content, if at all. As a refuge for the arty, the island, certain parts of it at any rate, is a matter of record, yet Mallorca has not lent itself to Great Works. And it was this absence that started to make me wonder.

Perhaps the two best known foreign literary figures with a clear Mallorcan identity are Robert Graves and George Sand. Graves, though he lived on the island on and off for nigh on sixty years, was too busy paving the way for Derek Jacobi to find international acclaim as Claudius to attempt a Mallorcan Great Work. Sand, holed up with Chopin in the shivering, tubercular hell of Valldemossa, gifted the world a winter in Mallorca, a book slavishly read by inquisitive Germans and largely ignored by everyone else. It is the very paucity of writing that has given rise to prominence being given to a minor thriller-ette by Agatha Christie and the absurd notion of invoking her as a promotional tool for Pollensa.

Into this barrenness has emerged pop literature. One hesitates to describe it as a movement; it is more of a crawl, with just a hint of the opportunist, a nod in the direction of Peter Mayle here, Ruth Rendell there, TV rights and a production unit somewhere else. If it has a cultural veneer, it is one polished to reflect the superficiality that can too easily be assigned to Mallorca. This is but one problem with the island and any pretence to the Great Work. The lack of depth is analogous with the lack of history. The joke with the cultural heritage is that Mallorca doesn’t have a history, outside of its own insularity. In European terms it hardly merits a footnote. Nothing of note has ever happened in Mallorca or to it. Jaume I, you might argue, but he was a part of a process that climaxed in Granada 263 years later. The Civil War, you might say. Well, you might, but so you could about anywhere in Spain. Other than aspects of the period that would rather be forgotten, such as the Guernica-bombing Condor Legion being based in Puerto Pollensa, Mallorca’s Civil War was not out of the ordinary, while Great Workers – Hemingway, Orwell – have done the subject of the war rather well.

But hang on. Go back a bit. Insularity. Mallorca may not have the potential for romanticised violence as other Mediterranean islands – Sicily and the Mafia, Corsica and its terrorism – but what it does have is an obstinate remoteness. Historical events may not lend themselves to a Great Work, but historical context most certainly does, and moulded into this context are the poets, artists, the polymath Llull, the families and the landed tradition.

Great Works are also great stories, of which the Spanish language has spawned translated crossovers with worldwide appreciation – Cervantes, Marquez for example. Villalonga wrote in both Spanish and Catalan; there is no reason why his epic “Bearn” should not be better known (it is available in English). Just as there is no reason why Mallorca shouldn’t lend itself to current-day Great Works, in Catalan, Spanish or English. It is the nature of a land apart that holds the key, a land that today finds itself caught in the conflict of internalising, as symbolised by those fiesta poems, and a Europe, Spain even, it once had little to do with. That’s the Great Work. Just one. How it got here.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.