- Home
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
- Barcelona Dreaming Reviewed by Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com
Barcelona Dreaming Reviewed by Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com
- By Wally Wood
- Published March 28, 2021
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
Wally Wood
Reviewer Wally Wood: Wally is an editor and writer, has published three novels, Getting Oriented:A Novel about Japan, The Girl in the Photo and Death in a Family Business. He obtained his MA in creative writing in 2002 from the City University of New York and has worked with a number of authors as a ghostwriter and collaborator.
With an extensive background in a variety of business subjects, his credits include twenty-one nonfiction books. He spent twenty-five years as a trade magazine reporter and editor and has been a volunteer writing and business teacher in state and federal prisons for more than twenty years. He has finished his fourth novel and has translated a collection of Japanese short stories into English.
Author: Rupert
Thomson
Publisher: Other Press
ISBN: 978-1-63542-042-5
Rupert Thomson’s latest
fiction arrived on my desk with high praise from Colm Tóbín, Philip
Pullman, and Andrea Wulf. The publisher bills Barcelona Dreaming as a
novel, but it is three long stories with a few linked characters.
Significant characters in one story are minor or peripheral in
another.
Barcelona Dreaming is Thomson’s thirteenth work of fiction (he’s also written a well-received memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop). He was born in Eastbourne in 1955, took the Cambridge entrance examination at 16, and studied medieval history and political thought. After college he taught English in Athens, wrote advertising copy in London, and has lived and worked in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Australia, and Spain. His first book, Dreams of Leaving, earned Thomson positive reviews, the sale of film rights, and $50,000 to write a screenplay. “And by the time that money ran out,” he said in an interview, “I had published a second novel and so from very early on I could be a full-time writer.”
In a March 2013 interview in The Guardian newspaper, Thomson is quoted as saying, “Fiction essentially teaches you to understand and empathize with other people. That's important. I think fiction is related to ethics in that you step out of your skin and become someone else for the period you are reading the book. And it is a short step to extrapolate from that to the teaching of compassion. As Amos Oz said, 'the person who imagines the other is better than the person who does not imagine the other'. For me, that is exactly the strength and raison d'etre of fiction. Film doesn't, and art doesn't, and music doesn't do it in the same way.”