Cityscapes: Seville, Cordoba, And Grenada: A Cultural History, by Elizabeth Nash

This is a book which pretends to speak in favor of the communities and cities it writes about but ends up inevitably criticizing it in one of two directions. Seville, Cordoba, and Grenada are all cities in the area of Andalucia, which have a long and somewhat tortured history as being among the places where Muslim rule held on the longest in the Iberian peninsula (this is most true in Grenada), and the author notes over and over again, in different ways, that the area has long dealt with a certain criminality in its history (due to its role as a longtime trade port as well as the presence of its Gypsy population), a place of flamboyant immorality (a lot of the people the author talks about, ostensibly positively, end up being drug addicts and/or flamboyant homosexuals), and also a place with a deeply conservative religious history as well as a long period of support for Franco and the Nationalist cause. The author, perhaps unsurprisingly, has very little good to say about Catholic festivals like the Semana Santa (Holy Week), or the Nationalist cause in general. While this is all pretty predictable, it does not make for a book that is as good as it should, or an encouragement to visit these places that is as great as it could have been.

This book is a bit less than 250 pages of material and it has 11 chapters, with 9 of them focusing on Seville and 1 each for Cordoba and Grenada, which are each interesting in their own right. The book begins with a foreword by Ian Gibson that puts personalized writing about Seville in a genial context, as well as a preface and acknowledgements section. This is followed by an introduction that discusses the site and fate of Seville as a river port some sixty miles up a large but increasingly sluggish river that despite its political importance lost its trade vitality when the river silted up. This is followed by a chapter on the importance of religion, ranging from Semana Santa to the Inquisition, to the life and history of Seville (1). This is followed by a somewhat politically correct discussion of Seville’s role in the Spanish imperial venture as well as the slavery issue (2). A discussion of art and architecture in Seville follows (3), along with a chapter on Seville’s role as a gateway to the Americas and a place of the Indies archive (4). The author spends a chapter discussing the legend of Don Juan and its context (5), and then goes on to spend a chapter talking about Carmen (6) and its relationship to Seville, and then spends an entire chapter talking about Seville’s fashionable men and women (7). There is a chapter devoted to Seville’s role in the Spanish Civil War (8) as well as a somewhat sour discussion of Flamenco culture in Seville (9) to finish the author’s thoughts on Seville itself. The last two chapters discuss Cordoba and its destruction and resurrection, and its importance to Muslim Spain (10), as well as the melancholy nature of Grenada as last Muslim stronghold in Spain as well as the home of Lorca and all that entails (11). The book then ends with suggestions for further reading and an index.

What is the point of a book like this anyway? There are many people who will visit Spain and will (unlike me) find it convenient to travel via high-speed rail to Seville rather than fly into Malaga for explorations of Gibraltar as my mother and I undertook when we visited Spain. Those people whose politics are right of center will find much to dislike about the author’s blithe fondness for Communist politics in Spain, as well as the author’s blatant favoritism for deviant artistic types. Those people who would be favorable to the gitano culture of Seville will find much to dislike in the author’s view that the Gypsy population is largely foreordained to suffering because of its background and that even those who are successful are still fated to struggle with criminality. The author would have done better to speak of probabilities of having trouble from a bad background rather than speaking of certainty. Similarly, even those authors who are interested in cheering on the artistic nature of Seville’s men will find much here to dislike in the author’s discussion of the cliches of Andalucian culture that the author views (in at least a second-hand fashion) as being valid. It seems hard to think that there is any group of people that would be disposed to think of the author’s writing as being positive or something that reflects their own views, and while this book is personal, it is personal to such an extent that it hardly seems appropriate as a guide to a city or a region.