A Story of Vim and Rigor

By Pico Iyer

BARCELONA by Robert Hughes; Knopf; 573 pages; $27.50

For Cervantes, Barcelona was a "refuge of foreigners, school of chivalry, and epitome of all that a civilized and inquisitive taste could ask for." For less quixotic souls, however, the Spanish city has always been something quite other, a contentious, raffish, yeasty place of shopkeepers. Catalans, as Robert Hughes sympathetically calls them, pride themselves on their pragmatism and their independent-mindedne ss: two of their sovereign virtues are mesura and ironia. And at the heart of their idealized self-image is seny, or "a natural level-headedness." The patron saint of Barcelona, St. Eulalia, is also the patron saint of stonecutters, bricklayers and millstone makers.

Hardly surprising, then, that the savory city of rebels and craftsmen would appeal to Hughes, the longtime art critic for TIME and the epic chronicler of his native Australia (in the best-selling Fatal Shore). In Barcelona Hughes shows, in magisterial detail, how the brash province has always been as distinct from Spain as Catalan is from Spanish (derived as it is not from early Latin but from later). At the same time he notes, with affectionate irony, how Catalans have sometimes sung the praises of their unique tongue in Spanish. Some Catalans, he remarks, feel homesick even while at home.

Barcelona, then, is not so much a travel book as a prodigiously researched biography of the city, taking in every nook and cranny of its involved history, from the 9th century confrontation of "Wilfred the Hairy" and "Charles the Bald" to the Postmodernist affectations of today's Catalan renaissance (the Olympic Village for this summer's Games, Hughes notes, was named after a Utopian socialist scheme of the last century that fizzled disastrously). In the Middle Ages, Catalan was probably more spoken around the Mediterranean than French, Italian or Spanish, and the Catalan empire had consulates in 126 places; later Barcelona was the home of the first submarine and the world capital of anarchism. Discoursing with authority on such arcana as bourgeois hairstyles of the 19th century, and spicing up his narrative with his own juicily vernacular translations of Catalan poetry, Hughes lights up even the structure of Catalan fishing nets with indelibly vivid descriptions ("gauzy forecourts and inner rooms hanging in the sea, into which whole schools of tuna would stray and be compressed to a frenzy of foam and chunky thrashing bodies").

The great distinction of Hughes' approach is that he can move, commandingly, from a Miro canvas to transvestite hookers in the street without missing a beat -- and bring to both the same kind of rigorous attention and full-bodied sensibility. Here is a critic who can put Joe Sixpack and Jacques Derrida in the same sentence. And if at times the sheer weight of detail may almost be dizzying to a newcomer, the text is enlivened at every turn by all the familiar props of the Hughes voice -- the mischievous erudition (translating a Latin motto as "Far down! Far out!"), the rococo diction ("fribblers" and "cutpurses" abound) and the Augustan bite (asides that wither "the mingy veneering of today's 'lite' architecture"). Beneath the virile lucidity of the prose, however, is a subtle and sensitive mind that can lead the reader, patiently, into complexity: "In Gaudi one sees flourishing the egotism achieved by those who think they have stepped beyond the bounds of the mere ego and identified themselves with nature, becoming God's humble servant but copying their employer."

It is, ultimately, for its unpretentiousness, its vigor and its sense of style and language that Hughes loves Barcelona. For the same reasons, one suspects, Barcelona would love Hughes.