BRILLIANT BOOKS IN BARCELONA

The fantastic old typewriter above is from the Hibernian Books bookshop. Hibernian Books (https://www.hibernianbooks.com) is a new and second-hand English language bookshop in Barcelona that I visited just before Christmas last year when my partner and son. I always look for a bookshop when I go anywhere, and it was lovely to visit this one!

The shop has a very good selection of all sorts of titles and near the entrance was a pile of one of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books. Highsmith wrote 5 sequels to her original book The Talented Mr Ripley and here was her Ripley Underground.

As someone who likes to read and write mysteries, and a big fan of The Talented Mr Ripley (the 1955 book and the 1999 American film)I had to buy this. I am happy to report that in Ripley Underground Tom Ripley shows himself to be the same brilliant anti-hero we’d seen before: a career criminal, a con artist, and a serial killer. Basically, a dreadful person, but his intelligence, wit and bravado manages to win the reader over and they can’t help rooting for him despite his terrible behaviour!  

I also loved the cover design of this Vintage Books edition. I think Patricia Highsmith had great fun writing Ripley, especially because, a Rennie McDougall says:

“With writing, Highsmith could inhabit the life of another. Her favorite disguise was Ripley, who appeared in five of her novel, and whom she came to think of as her double; she once signed off, “Pat H., alias Ripley.”  McDougall, R. 2021

This quote was from an article McDougall wrote in The New York Times and it’s worth reading that in her very informative NY times article

The Many Faces of Patricia Highsmith

I’m a big fan of Highsmith’s writing, but am also aware that she had a dark side which, although it helped her work, I’m not sure it helped the people she knew: her friends, her lovers and her publishers. But readers like me love her.

As Barcelona is in the Catalonia area of Spain, my son bought his dad a Penguin books edition of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. This was originally published in 1938 and described Orwell’s experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War against the Nationalist and Facist Francisco Franco.

As Orwell wrote to his publisher, “I greatly hope I come out of this alive if only to write a book about it.”orwellfoundation.com

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” orwellfoundation.com

Orwell, real name Eric Arthur Blair, is another brilliant writer with his own demons, much of which you can read in his essays and novels. His life and work is extremely interesting as it shows a man driven to use what tools he had to his disposal, his intellect and writing ability, to oppose Fascism and inequality. His novels are still in print but sadly some of their themes on totalitarianism and inequality are still with us.

If you’d like more information about George Orwell do look at this Wikipedia post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell