World's biggest book fair stirs cultural spat in Spain
FRANKFURT (AFP) — The Frankfurt Book Fair kicks off on Tuesday amid a searing row about Spanish regional identity sparked by its decision to choose Catalonia as this year's guest of honour.
Leading Spanish writers are refusing to attend the world's biggest book fair after months of bickering over who should represent the northeastern region of Spain which has been a Mediterranean melting pot of the arts through the ages and cherishes its cultural autonomy.
Nationalist tensions, never trailing far behind questions of identity in Spain, emerged after the regional capital Barcelona decided that only those who write in the Catalan language may come.
Under fire for playing politics, Barcelona -- which is a stronghold of Spain's publishing industry -- changed its mind in June and said all writers who hail from the region were welcome to represent it at the fair.
The U-turn rang hollow for Catalan authors like Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who writes in Spanish and scored an international hit with "The Shadow of the Wind", a whimsical mystery set in his native Barcelona.
He is boycotting the Frankfurt fair, along with Javier Cercas of "Soldiers of Salamis" fame and Eduardo Mendoza -- known to English audiences mainly for "The Year of the Flood", a heart-rending story of a nun who falls obsessively in love with a landowner.
The writers let it be known that they wanted Catalan -- the language of 13 million people which was banned during the dictatorship of Franco -- and those who write in it to have a well-deserved moment in the limelight.
But Ruiz Zafon has said the writers' polite stance masked their anger at politicians for trying to hijack the event and show the literary world a selective picture of the region that fits their separatist agenda.
Albert Sanchez Pinol, the author of the hit thriller "Cold Skin", was initially in the protest camp though he writes in Catalan, but now plans to attend.
"It is true that I considered not going but thinking about it I had the feeling that many people would be disappointed and perhaps it would harm Catalan culture," he said recently.
The conservative Popular Party of Catalonia said the boycott has created "an especially pitiful situation" because some of the region's best authors will be absent.
"If Catalan works written in Spanish are not represented, we will be fooling all the visitors," said the president of the party, Daniel Sirera.
The organisers of the Frankfurt fair are pleading innocent, though their choice of guest often makes for publicity-generating debates.
"We did not expect a controversy on this scale," spokesman Thomas Minkus told AFP.
He said the fair wanted to give Catalan literature a boost because it does not have the same international stature as Spanish literature, which has a vast audience among the world's half a billion Spanish speakers.
"We chose Catalan culture because it is one of the most exciting literary regions of Europe but it has not enjoyed the same wide success as Spanish books, simply because international publishing houses will always have somebody who can read Spanish works but not so for Catalan," Minkus said.
Where does Frankfurt stand in the debate about what is Catalan writing?
"We don't think it really matters in which language an author chooses to write," he said.
The organisers, who are expecting more than 100 Catalan authors to come to Frankfurt, can safely remain on the sidelines of the polemic because they do not pick the authors representing the guest of honour.
Instead they communicate their choice to the government concerned, which will usually make a grant to a cultural institution and allow it to manage the process.
In the case of Catalonia, Madrid asked the Ramon Llull Institute to organise its participation.
But many believe the institute, the Catalan equivalent of Spain's Cervantes Institute, allowed itself to be swayed by hardliners who wanted authors who write in Spanish to stay at home.
The Frankfurt book fair attracts nearly 300,000 visitors a year and has a turnover of tens of millions of euros in book deals.
Its guest of honour in 2008 will be Turkey, setting the stage for a culture clash between Islamic and western-orientated schools.
In 2009, it will be China's turn.
