The fictional literary genius and playwright Margot Tenenbaum is the reason I’m in Barcelona for the first time in twenty-three years.
During my visit in 1992 I had the pallor and the smoking-habit of the Wes Anderson creation from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), but not the mink and the missing fingertip. I spent that holiday with my Walkman headphones clamped to my ears listening to a demo from a band called Suede: ‘Won't someone give me a gun/Oh well it’s for my brother’. Days later, back home in England my brother died prematurely, while in his thirties. In hindsight that sequence of events and what followed had the hallmarks of the prologue from a Wes Anderson project. ‘The Royal Tenenbaums starts with a bomb going off. The rest of the story takes place in the wreckage’, says the critic Matt Zoller Seitz author of ‘The Wes Anderson Collection’. In Barcelona now, years after witnessing how death can disfigure a family as surely as a parental divorce fract…