Gaudi: A Biography [Hardcover]

Gaudi was a Catalan from Barcelona. He sculpted the famous La Sagrada Familia, Park Guell and a few other works including an apartment building. He was a modernist and his buildings frequently appeared alive, as if from some fantastical dream, crawling, moving, fluid. He was a genius, on par with Goya(who lived a century before and was a painter). This is a wonderful account of the life and times of Guadi. It explorers his passionate faith and his obsessive qualities. It also looks at his unique designs and revolutionary ideas while exploring the cataclysms and social movements which shook Spain from 1900-1940. A important addition to any collection and of interest to anyone who enjoys art and architecture

I have always felt a fascination with things that seem to have some unexpected, almost alien, aspect to them. In architecture this includes the temples at Angkor and the Hindu temples of India; are these the works of humankind? So it is with Gaudi. Where are the precursors? Where are the followers? Perhaps there are no followers because what he did was so exceptional no-one dares takes the same path. And then there is the man Gaudi as described in this book - he is no less alien; banishing intimacy with women from his life, being absorbed in catholicism, following a rigorous vegetarian diet. I didn't want speculation - I hate that in biographies - but I would have liked more information. For example, why was Gaudi a vegetarian - was it a religious tenet he was following, was it a moral one, was it health-driven?

Other reviewers have been disturbed by Mr Hensbergens command of the English language. This did not offend me. Perhaps the paperback version I am reviewing had been further edited. But I did find the book slow to capture my attention. Perhaps it was Gaudi and not the prose that finally engaged me - but engaged I was. Another feature that initially annoyed me was the placing of the four sections of illustrations. It seemed to me that I was forever hunting for an illustration for the text I was reading. But by the end of the biography this didn't offend me at all; in fact I grew to love hunting back and forth through the illustrations because as I did so I grew to know Gaudi's architecture better and better.

The book IS painful to read, if you love the English language. On the other hand, if you are able to laugh about bad writing, there are quite a few chuckles in the book. For example, van Hensbergen tells us about Graner's demon automaton in his cinema threatening customers with death, and comments: "This was rounded off by realising, after queuing patiently for one of the two ticket booths, that the usher was a dummy." I love the shift from the passive "was rounded off," which points to Graner's plan, to the ticket-buyer's active-voice subjectivity in "realising." Grammatically, of course, it's garbage. Imagistically, though, it's a kind of inspired madness not unlike the idea of a demon automaton itself.

Van Hensbergen's inadequate command of English grammar provides a constant source of humor. "This was the first time a nation - Catalonia - had connected into the history of a much wider Western culture." He means, of course, that it was the first time Catalonia had connected with that history, a broad but at least defensible claim; but of course what he says is that it was the first time a NATION had done so, which is just plain funny.

Here's another one that I love: "Built up in the Colserolla foothills on the slopes of Mont Tibidabo, Gaudi looked to the mediaeval Christian fort and the Moorish fortified hisn complex of Al-Andalus for his inspiration." I KNEW Gaudi wasn't born, but fashioned out of pipe cleaners and lizard scales, up on the slopes of Tibidabo! Van Hensbergen apparently believes that it's enough to mention the actual referent of "built" in the previous sentence: Bellesguard.

But my all-time favorite comes in the third line of the book: "Gaudi, Barcelona and Catalonia were, and still are, eternally intertwined." For sheer malapropist grace, that one is hard to beat. He means "integrally intertwined," of course. He just doesn't care enough about words to notice that "eternally" and "were, and still are" are mutually exclusive. But look at the economy of that oxymoron! The verbs give us the localized temporal reference, which is contradicted by the universalized adverb. And look at the cumulative effect of the verbs: WERE (and are no longer), and STILL ARE (for a while). He could have written "have always been eternally intertwined," but he didn't. It would have been much less powerful that way. The book isn't just badly written. Here and there it reveals a ubiquitous FLAIR for bad writing. (See, I tried to replicate van Hensbergen's oxymoron with spatial reference, and didn't do it nearly as well!)

The fair thing to say about van Hensbergen's atrocious writing is that he's Dutch, so give him a break. YOU try and write a book in a foreign language, Mr. Reader from Buffalo, see how far YOU get! The real culprits here are the editorial staff at HarperCollins. This isn't exactly a fly-by-night publishing operation. They should hire copyeditors to fix the kind of absurdities van Hensbergen's book is full of. But they're so busy saving money that they don't care. The book reads like van Hensbergen's first draft -- as if nobody else ever looked at it before it was typeset.

Still, I have to disagree with the reader from Buffalo on the book's ultimate value. True, we need more books on Gaudi. But this one is still useful, especially for someone like me who is planning a novel on Gaudi. Every other book available on Gaudi in English is 200 color plates and a brief and fairly pious biography; van Hensbergen has done an enormous amount of research into Gaudi's LIFE. And yes, you have to laugh or grit your teeth at the bad English, but it is pure unadulterated Romantic genius-worship to claim with the Buffalo reader that "an understanding of Catalanism with its piety, spiritualism, chauvinist patriotism and family values," while "helpful to understanding Gaudi's life," is "not essential to appreciating his work. Antoni Gaudi was a genius. Works of genius communicate themselves. That is all you really need to know admire and love Gaudi's designs."

If you are determined to treat Gaudi as an untouchable genius whose life is irrelevant to his work, don't read this book. If you kind of enjoy discovering that artistic geniuses are actually human, and fallible, and not a little neurotic, and if you aren't too fastidious with the English language, it's well worth the read.