For the New Year: Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones

Falcones, Ildefonso. Cathedral of the Sea. Black Swan, 2009.

Have you figured out your New Year's Resolutions yet? Have you made a list? Do you have good intentions but a lack of energy? I have been thinking about resolutions for the past few weeks, and rather than the usual diet- and exercise-themed stuff, I think I've settled on a more general plan. I want to live more mindfully. This would cover the healthy lifestyle genre since there's always something more I can do in that department. Usually at this time of year I make noise about wanting to read more, but I already read more than most people I know. What I'd like to do in 2018 is to read more mindfully, too: take more time to select good books, savor them, look up unfamiliar vocabulary words and concepts, and understand the author's motivation for writing the book. It takes SO MUCH work to write a book that I feel I owe it to an author who has written something worthwhile and meaningful to get the most out of it. I'd also like to write more reviews of books on Amazon--those mean a lot to authors.

Speaking of books that are meaningful and worthwhile, I just finished a rather long novel which left me continuing to think about its characters and location. The book is Cathedral of the Sea and it was written by Ildefonso Falcones. In its original Spanish, it was a huge hit in Europe. The cathedral in question is Santa Maria del Mar in the Ribera neighborhood in Barcelona, which turned out to be the focal point of my two-week stay there this summer. I fell in love with that cathedral and wrote a lengthy essay about it and its main character and the barrio around it while it was being constructed and what it is like now. Our tour guide recommended this novel to us inside the cathedral, and I scribbled the title and an approximation of the author's name in my little notebook. I found an English translation in a nearby shop.

The main character of the novel is Arnau Estanyol. We meet his parents before he's born and learn about medieval customs and laws of the peasant folk and then the urban citizens when Arnau and his father move to Barcelona. Arnau is enamored of that cathedral, and it becomes a focal point for him, too, throughout his life. This cathedral, in the Ribera district, was built by and for the working class people, many of whom carried huge stones across the city on their backs from a quarry on a mountain called Montjuic.

A bastaixo depicted on the door of Santa Maria del Mar

These laborers were called bastaixos, and they also unloaded cargo from ships at Barcelona's port. Arnau spent some time as a bastaixo as a young man, and cultivated work ethic by emulating his favorite colleagues. Despite his best intentions, he finds himself with jealous enemies and challenging situations, and the novel stays compelling throughout its 751 pages. (No kidding.)

This is a book to savor and to read mindfully. There's plenty of medieval history in there, plus well-developed characters for whom the reader grows to care deeply. When I finished the book last week, I was sorry to have to leave that world created by Falcones. How often does that happen when one finishes a novel?

Here are some more of my photos of Arnau's cathedral to help you daydream about Barcelona...

The front doors with bastaixos above

Inside the cathedral

The Rose Window

Pews

Chapel

The Great Railway Bazaar

Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar. Mariner, 1975.

“Speed puts some people to sleep; others it makes breathless. It doesn’t enliven conversation. I missed the slower trains with the lounge cars and the rackety wheels.” (p. 291)

Paul Theroux wrote those lines on the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, Japan, towards the end of his four months on the rails in Europe and Asia. At this point, the reader is beginning to notice that

Theroux is travel-weary. Four months is a long time to be on a train, and that he had to arrange each leg of the journey as he arrived at each new destination have made the trip an adventure. He chats with people on the train, at the stations, and in the places he visits. The variety of people and places is truly a ‘bazaar,’ (a Railway bazaar), and this reader feels as if she’s simultaneously taken the trip with Theroux and time-traveled 40 years back in time. The journey is described in detail in The Great Railway Bazaar from 1975.

The quote above caught my eye and caused me to reflect on some train trips I’ve taken. Madrid to Granada, Spain: similar to Theroux’s descriptions in that the changing views out the window (weather, local clothing, city vs. country) contrast the train’s interior situations (characters, conversations, behavior, ambient light). My exterior view changed from urban to rural (with windmills and olive trees), and the scruffy interior of the train was populated by an assortment of travelers. There was a movie to entertain us (Theroux didn’t have movies!), and a dining car from which my companion brought me a surprisingly delicious ham sandwich. Most of Theroux’s rides were more colorful and exotic than this, but my experience helped me understand him. Towards the end of his adventure when he had become weary, he described the Japanese Super Express which blasted through dull suburbs populated by silent passengers. This train reminded me of the German bullet train on which I traveled from Cologne to Berlin, Germany, also through blah suburbs with travelers and commuters wrapped-up in their own work or reading. It was cool to speed through the country on such a fast train, but the ride did not supply much in the way of travel adventure. The Spain train had character.

In Spain, the train approaches the plain.

Theroux had ample time to come up with astute observations during his four-month trek. I copied six pages of interesting sentences that might be quotable in future train-themed essays. He’s quotable even when he gets cranky on the Trans-Siberian Express and has to walk through below-freezing temperatures in-between cars in order to get to the dining car three cars away. He has bad dreams and feels guilty about leaving his family so long: “Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed and imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall,” (p. 323).

On the last page he reveals what he has learned from the trip: “…the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows,” (p. 342). I thought that sentence was particularly interesting because Theroux writes both travel and fiction, and I wonder how he thinks differently when creating each.

I would not have been disappointed by his ending if he had left it at that, but the crafty Theroux then worked in the book’s first sentence as its last, about how he “seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” That’s true for me, too, and I would add that I have never heard a train song and not wished I was on it (with the possible exception of the Grateful Dead’s).