Juan Miñana’s ideal novel

The ideal novelwhich takes the reader – between smiles and fascination – through the paths of the best literature, is destined to be one of the great fictions about City of Barcelona.

From the most decadent bohemia to the splendors of naturist nudism, passing through esotericism and libertarian movements, Xavier Viura (Barcelona, ​​1882 – Barcelona, ​​1947), poet, playwright and translator, reinvents himself to adapt to the spirit of permanent change.

Miñana places us in a house on Rosaleda Street, 19 in Pedralbes, “a place where the city was blurred between isolated villas, cultivated fields, some sports fields now abandoned, religious schools seized by the unions, modest farmhouses and bourgeois houses of playtime”. Viura has finally fled Barcelona. After living with different characters who end up fleeing to France, she is left alone for months, feeding on the nuts that the fig tree in the garden had provided her with the supplies exhausted. When she consumes the last one, she decides to let herself die. «She lay down as long as she was, without undressing or taking off her shoes. The climatic scenery could not have accompanied it better: unpleasant rain, humid wind. And she crossed her hands over her chest to compose a grave recumbent figure and enter into definitive nothingness.

One morning, “after three days of spiritual teasing, he rebelled by opening his eyes to see that he was still here, in this world, and that the only light he had been able to reach was that of an unusual day of radiant sun in December.” To celebrate his life, he goes out to the garden and, naked, hugs the fig tree: “Sister fig tree. Why did Jesus curse you in the New Testament? If he did not curse even his executioners in full agony! And that act, he will take him to Modelo prison for indecent exhibitionism.

Behind bars, Xavier Viura’s story goes back and forth in time.

Through the pages of The ideal novel, we are spectators of the great events that Barcelona experienced during that period of its history, such as the International Exhibition of 1929, which led to the creation of the radio. «The upcoming inauguration […] is requiring new content to expand broadcasts. “Culture traveling through the air, friend Viura,” dreams Juli Pons, one of the most important disciples of Enrique Granados.

The astonishment of a writer of extemporaneous erudition and dignity to the naturist society Pentalfa, “organ of the Trophological Teaching School of the same name”, of the founder-director Nicolás Capo, who preaches vegetarianism and nudism in a prudish society, and the collective amazement at the always unexpected twists of the story, make this novel an artifact interspersed with humor, full of real characters, but also a book that offers indelible charges of depth and immerses the reader in a hypnotic literary journey.