Eighteen established writers, one from each city/region, were commissioned to write a chapter in a response to their Arts & Society theme within the context of their city.
Just as Ulysses is innovative in its form and language, so the writers were chosen with a view to reflecting a breadth of genres, styles and innovations. All the (new) chapters from the 18 cities/regions will be brought together in a book to be published in the Autumn 2024: ULYSSES European Odyssey.
Alberto Lema wrote Lugo’s chapter.
Writer’s Statement
Lucus, Lupus and Octopus
Nobody knows how many tapas they can give you for free when you have a drink in Lugo. The generosity of the Luguese innkeepers is legendary and exceeds the most elementary rules of economic viability: it seems they offer you much more food than the value of your drink. But they are still there today, so there must be, oddly enough, a positive balance between what they give and what they take.
The festival of San Froilán becomes the apotheosis of the love story between the city and its gastronomy. It stars the octopus; more the true saint worshiped than the poor saint himself. Froilán, born in Lugo in the 9th century, was sanctified for his exemplary life in defence of the poor. He was also a miracle maker: it is said that he could tame wolves, and so is represented with a wolf by his side. The relationship between Lugo and the octopus, which is not a coastal city, goes back to the dried octopus that the Lugo church collected from its tributary towns on the Galician coast.
There are words that seem destined to pair up some day in the future, such as octopus and wolf, and what better place than Lugo for their meeting? Their original names in Latin, Lucus, lupus and octopus, seems to validate our theory. Perhaps History, as Stephen feared, is really a collective nightmare caused by a huge meal from which we are all trying to wake up in a place like Lugo, a city surrounded by stone, fog and despair.
Writer’s Biography
Alberto Lema was born in Bamiro in 1975. He is a Galician writer and politician. He graduated in English Philology from the University of Santiago de Compostela and has cultivated various literary genres, such as poetry, narrative, literary criticism and journalistic chronicle. In the field of poetry, he has published two poetry books so far, Plan de fuga (Escape Plan, 2008) and Crónica do chan (Soil Chronicle, 2014). His four novels are: Unha puta percorre Europa (A whore travels across Europe, 2008, translated into Spanish); Sidecar (2009, translated into Spanish), Da Máquina (About the Machine, 2012, translated into Spanish) and Pazo de inverno (Winter Palace, 2021). His work explores the possibilities of political expression in literature using various forms: the detective genre, science fiction or the historical chronicle, as an attempt to overcome Postmodern parody without repeating the archaic naÏveté of the great meta-narratives.
His work is organised through conflicts that have the classical triad – nation, class and gender – as their subject. He publishes weekly opinion columns in various Galician media outlets and his political activism in left-wing nationalist parties and trade-unions led him to form part of the government of the A Coruña city council between 2015 and 2023.
Lema is a monolingual writer in Galician, in a country in which the mere choice of the literary language is in itself a political act. He is still a member of the city council of A Coruña.