Barcelona Metropolis

All these impressions are captured in Homage to Barcelona, the book Tóibín wrote more than thirty years ago. This year, Barcelona City Council and Ara Llibres are reissuing it in Catalan – and, for the first time, publishing it in Spanish – to mark the Guadalajara International Book Fair (Mexico), where Barcelona is the guest city. First published in 1990, the book began as a commission from a British travel publisher. Tóibín wrote it nearly a decade after leaving Barcelona, supported by a grant and with the Olympic bid in the air. “I wanted it ready before the Games. My aim was to understand why Barcelona is the way it is. I didn’t want to write a history book or a diary, but something that combined both”, he explains.

He spent a year poring over material in libraries, archives and foundations, shaping the text around questions that came to him – always attentive to art and architecture – as he wandered through the city’s neighbourhoods: To what extent can Picasso be considered a Catalan artist? Where was Miró between 1920 and 1970? Why is the city centre so dense, and the Eixample so rational? The result is a hybrid book, weaving together major historical episodes and personal recollections, and one that has retained a remarkable freshness. Why hasn’t it aged, 35 years after its original publication? Tóibín says he wouldn’t change a thing. “The chapters on the Civil War, Miró or Gaudí – I’d leave them exactly as they are. Perhaps I’d add a section on the reconstruction of the Sagrada Família”, he adds with a touch of irony. Like any true Barcelonan, he didn’t expect it to be finished quite so soon.

Virtues of distance

For a young and inexperienced Irishman like Tóibín, Barcelona back then was much more than just a sun-drenched setting – it was a place where everything, from food and desire to protest, burned with an intensity he had never known before. He was captivated by the city’s political life. “There were two irreconcilable visions of what Spain was going to become, and it felt as if the conflicts of the 1930s were returning. But what actually happened was a miracle”. He remembers demonstrations where “Catalans and Andalusians marched together” for a shared ideal, and nights spent meeting other gay men in a world that was still clandestine but growing increasingly uninhibited. “I met two men who had become socialists because of gay rights. Back in 1977, I had never even heard of gay rights”.

The son of teachers, and once a shy, stammering, unmotivated student, Tóibín stumbled into literature almost by chance. The death of his father and the loneliness of boarding school left a deep mark. His homosexuality would become another powerful influence on his writing, as shown in novels like The Magician, about Thomas Mann, and The Master, a portrait of Henry James – his literary hero. He feels that, beyond giving him a private sense of difference, it gave him a sidelong perspective on the world – a critical distance from his surroundings. Perhaps it is from this viewpoint that he has been able to perceive what those too close often fail to see.

He had no plans to write about Ireland but found that to truly capture its colours he first had to leave. His debut novel, The South, came out in 1990. It tells the story of an Irish woman who leaves her husband and child behind to move to Barcelona, study painting and, in the process, falls in love with a former Republican soldier, with whom she retreats to the Catalan mountains (Tóibín, fascinated by the Pyrenees, owns a home in Pallars). Perhaps his best-known novel is Brooklyn, about Irish emigration to the United States – a tale of identity, displacement and social change, told in the understated, refined style that has become his hallmark. Last year, he continued this story with Long Island, in which the protagonist, Eilis, returns to Ireland to confront her past. In between, he wrote Nora Webster, inspired by his mother, about a middle-aged woman widowed in 1960s Ireland – a portrait of the quiet resilience of an ordinary woman.

The “miracle” of Catalan

Another recurring theme in Tóibín’s work is art and artists, collected in La mirada captiva [The Captive Gaze], an anthology published by Arcadia in 2024. In Homage to Barcelona, he argues that the city’s defining architectural style is Catalan Gothic rather than Modernisme. “Churches such as Santa Maria del Mar, Sant Just and even Barcelona Cathedral have extraordinary architectural strength. They have no flying buttresses, they are solid, bare. I’m particularly struck by Santa Maria del Mar, especially after the fire it suffered during the Civil War. There is also a clear continuity with civic architecture – the Generalitat, Plaça del Rei… The Catalan vault is a technical marvel”, he explains. He also recalls wandering through La Boqueria market in the 1970s, where only Catalan was spoken. He immediately set out to learn to speak the language. His teachers included the linguist Toni Strubell and the poet Lluís Urpinell. “When we had dinner together, they’d tell others, ‘Don’t speak to him in Spanish, only Catalan’. I was something of an experiment in integration”. Later, he met Aina Moll and Miquel Strubell, who were instrumental in developing the immersion education model, and he closely followed the creation of TV3 [Catalan public television]. “I was fascinated by the Catalans’ passion for their language. The story of Catalan is, to me, a miracle: a minority language that has become ubiquitous. It’s very rare to find anything quite like it anywhere else in the world”.