Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Book About a Great City, 15 Jul 2002
By A Customer
In advance of a recent trip to Barcelona, was scouring bookshops for suitable volumes to take, and loathe to take Robert Hughes' heavier tome (in both weight and subject matter) was pleased to find this lovely short volume. Colm Toibin has many years' experience from living on-and-off in the city and his love for it (and exasperation at times) shines through. Presents the city in its context as the capital of a region yearning for autonomy, and dissects its relationship with Spain as a whole, with good, brief chapters on politics and history. The greater part explores the artistic personalities which I am particularly interested in, namely Picasso, Miro and the ubiquitous Gaudi. The above description sounds dry, in fact the prose is unpretentious and easy to read. Highly recommended.
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Homage to this memoir of Barcelona, 15 Jul 2004
I read this book in 1994 while working on a rural development project in El Salvador. I had never been to Barcelona and that post-war time in El Salvador was hard. There was violence and the threat of violence. There was brutality and silence and ignorance and poverty and hardship and want and illiteracy. Starved of English-language reading material, or indeed, any reading material at all, I fell upon Homage to Barcelona by Toibin. I didn't start it with any great anticipation but by the end of it I almost had to tie myself down to prevent me running to the airport and boarding the next plane for Barcelona. I read the bit about the bar where the old man and his sons and grandsons served up hams and sherries and wines, where there were wooden barrels and I cried for that city I had never visited. When I did get to go to Barcelona I made sure I had the book with me and enjoyed re-reading it in all the places it mentions. I felt I knew the city with the knowledge contained within the book at my disposal. This is a really great book and fitting homage to a really great city.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
interesting read spoilt by poor research, 10 Dec 2008
I enjoyed this book, and even though I live in Barcelona I learned a lot more about the city than I knew before reading the book. Toibín writes well but his book, at least the Picador edition that I read, is very poorly researched, and the proofreading is quite disastrous. I noted literally dozens of inconsistencies, misspellings and outright errors and impossibilities (Miró was born in Tarragona province, page 98, and was also born in 1893 in Passeig del Crèdit, in the centre of Barcelona, according to page 80). I hope that subsequent editions eliminated these errors (which I pointed out to the publisher, without acknowledgement) because the book has plenty of merit, and I suppose that most of the people reading the book will be unaware of most the inconsistencies and wrong spelling.
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