Jordi Nopca has written a collection of stories that will take you to the streets, homes, and workplaces of contemporary Barcelona, a city managing the economic problems and political strife of the last decade.

This is a collection of short stories and the first work of Spanish Catalan author Jordi Nopca to be translated into English. Each story is set in one of the neighborhoods in and around Barcelona. While most of the characters have college degrees, most of them are dealing with economic insecurity, whether they've managed to find work in a restaurant or as a journalist. Things are precarious, relationships falter under the weight of unemployment. But the stories aren't depressing, Nopca's characters are a resilient lot. And while, on the whole, the stories themselves were not extraordinary, the setting and the culture were and I really enjoyed getting a glimpse of how ordinary Barcelonians live. ( )

Described in the blurb as a 'group portrait of contemporary Barcelona, beaten by the economic crisis and divided by a secessionist movement', Come On Up is a collection of short stories that are, in every way, slice-of-life stories. Centered on believable characters with generally mundane lives and concerns, the book is weighted with a sort of apathetic trudging forward; the inertia of the stories is built from strong writing and realism, with only the sort of absurdity that feels true to life, but the stories blend together in a way that makes me think these might have been more successful separated out among journals vs all collected together in a single volume. Because, as it is, most of the stories held the same flavor and the same tone, with little to distinguish them beyond the particular lives at their center--the problem being that these lives/characters were, in many ways, themselves single-toned and interchangeable.

I'd be curious what a novel from the author would look like, but in general, this collection suffers from what too many single-author short story collections suffer from--a sort of repetitiveness of mood and lack of progression. And when that is added to the fact that the stories themselves are somewhat downtrodden and casual in focus, this ends up being a hard collection to recommend. ( )

Book Review-Come On Up by Jordi Nopca

Being a fan of Spanish literature and the city of Barcelona I looked forward to this new book.

A collection of short stories that documents the lives of a variety of working-class people living in Barcelona after the economic collapse of 2009.

Hotel workers, waiters, small business people, immigrants, individuals and couples give rise to a variety of life situations. Nopca depicts the harsh economic realities.

This is a book that provides a glimpse of Barcelona during those times. It is interesting but could not be called inspiring.

The book received a blurb from the great Enrique Vila-Mata, a favorite of mine, which should provide encouragement and promise to this younger writer’s future work. ( )

With a few exceptions, I didn't find these stories very interesting. I also thought some of them read less like stories and more like excerpts of longer works (that I wouldn't want to read): their endings seemed random enough that they could've equally ended in another spot (preferably several pages earlier).