{"id":302696,"date":"2015-10-13T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/10\/13\/private-life\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:29","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:29","slug":"private-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/10\/13\/private-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Private Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Josep Maria de Sagarra\u2019s Private Life<\/em>, a man harangues his friend about literature while walking through Barcelona at night: <\/p>\n

\n

When a novel states a fact that ties into another fact and another and another, as the chain goes on the events begin to seem more and more extraordinary, and the characters take on a chiaroscuro effect without grays, and the melodrama builds, most people reading the novel will think it\u2019s a bunch of lies, and that such things are impossible in real life. And the truth is exactly the opposite: if you just write down the characters and the \u201cpermutations\u201d you can find in a city like ours \u2013 right here in Barcelona . . . Believe me, there\u2019s no need to wait for a dark, sensational crime, the kind that scare concierges stiff when they read about them in the newspapers. These splashy, absurd crimes and criminals are not at all important, you see. But, if you could look within high society gentlemen and ladies who appear to live perfectly gray and proper lives, whom no one would ever suspect of anything, who appear incapable of a violent gesture or of any slightly spectacular and interesting act . . . If you could follow in their hideous footsteps, you would have more plots than you could ever know what to do with. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The irony of this quote is that the speaker is one of these \u201chigh-society gentlemen\u201d who happens to be partially responsible for a shocking event involving an acquaintance. While this gentleman has been involved in some sketchy business in the past, people would never suspect that he would have anything to do with the events that transpired that very night. Even though he may not have legally done anything wrong, his actions earlier in the novel began a chain of events resulting in the death of this acquaintance. <\/p>\n

In Private Life<\/em>, Sagarra follows the footsteps of the speaker and his associates, and he certainly does find more plots that one could ever know what to do with. In fact, after spending most of the first half of the book focusing on the Lloberola family, Sagarra introduces a bevy of characters just as questionable as the speaker before returning to them. Instead of interrupting the main storyline, though, Sagarra actually manages to weave the different plot strands into a rich tapestry equivalent to the one that the family\u2019s patriarch, Don Tom\u00e0s de Lloberola, was forced to sell.<\/p>\n

Don Tom\u00e0s is not the only one with money problems, though: His oldest son, Frederic, is always trying to get himself out of financial trouble. An acquaintance of Frederic\u2019s, Antoni Mates, also known as the Baron Falset, is willing to give him a loan to help him pay some debts, but only if he can get a co-signer. Frederic tries to get his father to help, but Don Tom\u00e0s refuses. As if things weren\u2019t bad enough for Frederic, he and his wife are on the brink of a divorce, and his children don\u2019t care too much for him either. Instead of trying to improve matters, however, he just prefers to ignore them until things come to a head. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Don Tom\u00e0s\u2019s younger son, Guillem, is involved in some shady business with the Baron, his wife, and a seamstress who brings them together. When Guillem learns that the Baron can help Frederic with his financial problems, he interferes despite that fact he \u201ccertainly didn\u2019t have any feelings for his brother\u201d and \u201ckept his distance from him, just as he kept his distance from his parents.\u201d After a while, though, Guillem takes things too far. Eventually, his interference in Frederic\u2019s affair leads to consequences that are both tragic and ironic. <\/p>\n

But as mentioned before, Private Life<\/em> isn\u2019t just a story about the Lloberolas and their problems and schemes: It\u2019s about a society dealing with the changes that come during the end of the Restoration and the beginning of the Second Spanish Republic. Toward the end of the book\u2019s first half, the older Lloberolas find themselves even more estranged from the city\u2019s aristocracy and begin to recede into the novel\u2019s background. In their place, socialite Hort\u00e8nsia Portell puts together an \u201ceclectic crew,\u201d a crew that worships Josephine Baker over the Virgin of Montserrat and includes one of the dictator\u2019s generals. Later, characters with minor roles start to become more prominent; these include Conxa Pujol, the Baron\u2019s widow who ends up in a kind of power struggle with Guillem, and N\u00edobe Casas, the gypsy dancer who is a \u201cpowerful magnet for devotees of communism and transcendental nonsense.\u201d Also, as Frederic\u2019s children, Maria Lu\u00efsa and Ferran, become adults, they connect with some of their father\u2019s old associates, including Rosa Tr\u00e8nor, Frederic\u2019s on-again, off-again lover; and Robert \u201cBobby\u201d Xucl\u00e0, his former friend whom he had a falling out with. As a result, Rosa and Bobby find themselves tangled in the lives of the next generation of Lloberolas. <\/p>\n

As intriguing as the lives of these characters and their connections to each other are, though, what really makes Private Life<\/em> a compelling read are Sagarra\u2019s vivid details of this crumbling society and his keen observations about it. Sure, they\u2019re not always pretty, especially since many of characters have a tendency to neglect not only their dilapidating properties, but their physical appearances and moral upbringings. Then again, any novelist who begins with scene where a man wakes up to the sight of a stuffed dog isn\u2019t going to marvel about how beautiful life can be. Still, thanks to Mary Ann Newman and her sparkling translation, Sagarra\u2019s masterpiece is finally available in English. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Josep Maria de Sagarra\u2019s Private Life, a man harangues his friend about literature while walking through Barcelona at night: When a novel states a fact that ties into another fact and another and another, as the chain goes on the events begin to seem more and more extraordinary, and the characters take on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[2176,366,54156,62646,29636],"class_list":["post-302696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-archipelago-books","tag-catalan-literature","tag-christopher-iacono","tag-josep-maria-de-sagarra","tag-mary-ann-newman"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":335556,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302696\/revisions\/335556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}