Jason Webster on The Wonder of Spain

Tell me about your first choice, Ibn Tufail’s The Journey of the Soul.

This is a novella which was written in the 12th century. Ibn Tufail was born in a town called Guadix near Granada and he was Ibn Rushd’s teacher who was a great philosopher. I think it is an extraordinary book. Many people see it as one of the inspirations behind Robinson Crusoe. There was a translation done of it from the Arabic into Latin just a few years before Defoe wrote Crusoe and there are various parallels between the two books.

The story is that there is a boy who is the son of a princess and for various reasons the princess has to cast him off and she sets him afloat in a box and he arrives at an island and survives. The story is essentially how the boy becomes a young man and then a fully grown adult and his discovery of the world around him with no one to teach him. So you see this autodidactic journey that he goes on, first of all exploring the outer world around him, the animals and plants. And this journey starts turning into an inner journey and becomes essentially a story of a man’s journey towards ultimate truth.

For me it’s really interesting because there is something quite modern about this book that was written in the 12th century – he talks about vivisection and how blood flows through the body. There is almost an understanding of evolution there. And also I think it is an incredible work of imagination. 

All the books that I have chosen are examples of the power of the Spanish imagination. Although Tufail starts with the scientific he ends up in the mystical, so for me this is a good kicking-off point. You have four Spaniards and one Englishman. Tufail is a mystic and Lorca is a poet and Buñuel, who is my next choice, is a visionary eccentric film-maker – again working very much from the imagination.

This is Luis Buñuel’s My Last Sigh?

Yes. He is fantastic at the celebration of the non-rational which is one of the things that I find very appealing about Spain. This is Buñuel’s autobiography where he talks about how important it is to let his mind wander and to daydream even though it is becoming more and more unfashionable. He is almost like a prophet of non-rationality in this very rational world. He’s lucky in that he lived during a time when other non-rationalists are doing something similar. His group included Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca. So he was part of the surrealist movement for a while, although the surrealists are seen as a strangely hierarchical sort of structure. They don’t seem to be very freedom-loving when it comes to how they act. They were constantly bickering amongst themselves and then kicking people out of their group if it offended their ideas, which is a bit of a contradiction in terms. 

What is great about the book is that it gives you Buñuel’s life which spanned a large part of the 20th century and Spain entered it pretty much in the Middle Ages in 1900, and by the time he died in 1983 it has gone through two dictatorships, the Civil War and has finally come out as a fledgling democracy. So the 20th century is an amazing century for Spain. I don’t think quite as many countries have been through so much change, and you get a real sense of that with his book. 

In the early chapters he is talking about his childhood hear Zaragoza in a little village. He came from quite a wealthy family with servants but he is surrounded by this medieval poverty and the feudal system. And he laments the loss of that. 

I think there is something fundamentally surreal about life in Spain if you are open to it.

And was the only non-Spaniard on your list open to it? This is Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

Yes, I think so. I chose him because I felt, of the various foreigners who come to Spain and engage with Spain, his is the best book in terms of engaging with this dreamy and poetic truth at the heart of Spain. Lee really expresses that very well.

The book is set in the 1930s so the timing is interesting. This is the second book in his trilogy of memoirs. His first is Cider with Rosie about his childhood, then this book and finally, A Moment of War. In this one he leaves his home in the Cotswolds in England and decides to go to Spain. He says the reason he did that is because he knew how to ask for a glass of water in Spanish! It was the only language he knew, so he jumped on a boat and came to Spain.

He just about made ends meet by playing the fiddle. He was there for a few years and left just as the Civil War was breaking out. So he was there at an extraordinary time. Interestingly, in the book this is only ever hinted at and I think it is all the more powerful for that, because you know what is happening and what is going to happen. And then he comes back and fights against Franco, which is the story he tells in his next book.

Deep Song and Other Prose is written by one of Spain’s greats, Federico García Lorca.

Lorca is someone who is deeply, deeply engaged in this kind of poetic, mystical, surrealist, non-rational theme that is so much part of Spain.