El impulso nómada

Jordi Esteva is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding travel writers in Spanish literature. With The Nomad Impulse he offers us the keys to understand the intimate reasons for travel, movement, the inescapable need to leave. A memorialistic book, The Nomad Impulse recounts the author's childhood and adolescence during which, driven by the aridity of the Franco years, his curiosity for what is different and his fascination with what is far away are awakened in him. 'One day I'll go away and you won't see me again', he uttered over and over again as a child, as he pored over geography books, atlases and maps. Later, the book dwells on the discovery of homosexuality and the description of the underground Barcelona of the seventies, a time of great creativity and at the same time marked by the destructive capacity of drugs. The first trips to Sudan and India are narrated, and mainly the five-year stay in Egypt, a country in which Jordi Esteva became integrated into intellectual and artistic circles, with the inevitable involvement in politics, until the threats of the Egyptian secret police, including prison terms, forced him to leave. The dream of the nomad had been broken, the possibility of living in Egypt and being part of a different world. And the Barcelona to which Esteva returned was already prey to disenchantment as the city headed for post-Olympic speculation and tourist trivialization, while AIDS was wreaking havoc among friends. All this makes up, in the words of Jacinto Antón in El País, 'exciting and moving memories in which Jordi Esteva openly reviews his life, his extraordinary travels, his sexuality and his dreams'.