My favorite things Spain, literature

Not really a contemporary, actually a postwar writer, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester is highly recommended. The only Spaniard who truly mastered the latin-american genre par excellence – la literatura fantástica – GTB also wrote a bildungsroman that stands as a masterpiece in any language: “Filomeno, a mi pesar”. If you can only read one of his books, “Filomeno” should be your choice.

Tyler,
Thanks for the recommendations. For El Cid, you put a link to “Life is a Dream.” I think you meant to put the following link or something like it:

http://www.amazon.com/Poem-Cid-Language-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140444467/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203779768&sr=1-1

Ahh, Spanish culture.

Enjoy a nice Tempranillo for me.

Not Cela?

You forgot the wonderful Alejandro Casona and his great plays. He lived most of his productive life in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he wrote most of his literature, but he is of spanish origin, was born in Spain, live there until he`s thirties I believe, and chose to die there.
Have tried reading Lorca`s “La Casa de Bernarda Alba”? Anything but unreadable…But you have to get used to the jargon.

Tyler,

I read you almost daily, so please excuse the first-name basis. I wish I had not missed your visit to Madrid, as I would have loved to be at your talk, and I hope you enjoyed the food around the center.

Here are some recommendations I think you will like. In vaguely chronological order:

Quevedo: _El buscón_ (the real title is longer, but that’s how everyone calls it). Picaresque, episodic, epistolary first-person account of being down and out in XVIIth century Spain. It’s fascinating in its depiction of the social strata, and the economist in you will enjoy reading its insight on how Spain’s “hidalguía” (pride of nobility, and boasting of not working) destroyed the kingdom’s economy. It’s also still quite readable in terms of language. If you can read modern Spanish, just get a student’s edition with footnotes from Cátedra, and you will be able to navigate the passages where too much knowledge of contemporary society is implied. A lot of English novel, from Tom Jones (indeed all of Fielding) to Vanity Fair, have an enormous debt to Spanish picaresque novel, of which _El buscón_ is the prime example.

I concur with you that the Spanish XVIIIth century is quite bleh. However, you are discounting the XIXth century prematurely. We had our Realist and Naturalist movements, as most of Spain managed to avoid the Enlightment when the French were kicked out… but writers were caught in the thinking bug, and wrote about life around them. Just two writers and two novels:

Leopoldo Pérez Galdós: _La de Bringas_. A novel about class and standing in a society that wishes to aspire to the comfort of modernity while preserving the traditions of a Catholic monarchy. Also quite funny and terrible.

Leopoldo Alas, “Clarín”: _La regenta_. This has recently been translated into English, and by “recently” I mean “in the last ten years or so”. This is a story of passion and adultery between the young wife of a provincial judge and a young and manly priest in the local cathedral. I read it ages ago, but I remember it as part satire of provincial society, part psychological examination of passion and repression. Imagine the bastard child of Madame Bovary and Heathcliff, and you have your priest.

In the early XXth century, you missed Valle Inclán, his sonatas are quite short evocations of medieval nostalgia in contemporary (turn of the century) settings. And short enough to read in a night. His poems are also worth reading. Just try _Rosa de sanatorio_. Best experienced by listening to it read by José Luis Moreno Ruiz at the beginning of his radio program.

Post-war, not to be missed are:

Luis Martín Santos: _Tiempo de silencio_. A quite harrowing story about a doctor involved with a poor family after a girl’s abortion. Pellucid prose. He would have been great, had he not died young in a car accident.

Camilo José Cela: He wrote a lot, and in his last years for far too long at each stretch, in my opinion. Read his early stuff: _Viaje a la alcarria_ or _La familia de Pascual Duarte_. _La colmena_ is also quite good, very impressionistic. However, he pales in comparison to…

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. He lived very long and was very prolific. I have not read any of his later works, though my family loved _Filomeno, a mi pesar_ and _El rey pasmado_. In my opinion, however, his great est work was in the 70s. La saga-fuga de J.B._ is a world-class masterpiece of magic realism seen through the filter of north american experimental literature. Torrente Ballester lived and taught in the USA, so his novel is both informed by Cortázar and Cheever, García Märquez and John Barth. And he the prose just flows, and he is *hilarious*. For a more classical, more social-realist novel, you can also go for his earlier trilogy of _Los gozos y las sombras_ (_El señor llega_, ). I confess only having seen the TV series as a child, but hey. I am not passing a test here.

Miguel Espinosa: Not very well known, more of a “cult” author. He wrote an essay about the United States (_Reflexiones sobre Norteamérica_) with a clear Hegelian slant, but it’s a short volume and I think you would enjoy it. His novels range from the very experimental, cerebral and conversational _Escuela de mandarines_ to the very autobiographical (apparenty his girlfriend left him for another woman and he became a bit unhinged) _La tríbada falsaria_.

Eduardo Mendoza: His first four novels are masterpieces. Two of them (_La verdad sobre el caso Savolta_ and _La ciudad de los prodigios_) are historical novels about a change of regime in Spain through the microcosm of Barcelona: Savolta is about the Civil War period, and Ciudad is about the rise of the Catalan burgeoisie between the XIXth and the XXth century. The other two, _El misterio de la cripta embrujada_ and _El laberinto de las aceitunas_, are about

Félix de Azúa. Poet, novelist, essayist (he is a Professor of Aesthetics at Universitat de Barcelona). I like him in all three roles, but I recommend you go for his _Historia de un idiota contada por el mismo_, a funny fictionalised autobiography that mirrors the evolution of Spanish society from the late 60s and 70s up into the 80s.

José Antonio Millán. Disclaimer: he is a close friend. But as we only became friends after I interviewd him so he could dedicate to me his short story collections, I think fair is fair. The books in question are _La memoria y otras extremidades_ and _Sobre las brasas_. They are published by Sirmio or El Acantilado, and they went ignored in Spain, but received a very good review in an American journal. Go figure. _Nueve veranos_, his third collecton, is up for download from his site, but (and he’ll read this and hate me for even daring to think it) it’s merely very good: the earlier collections were perfect.

Ah, and one collection of poems. The only three contemporary Spanish poets that I brought with me when I left Spain were Moreno-Ruiz, Azúa (both of them mentioned above) and Luis Alberto de Cuenca. De Cuenca’s _El otro sueño_ manages to recapitulate the whole history of modernism without abandoning the genteel traditions of metric and rhyme. And he is quietly funny and smart without being less poignant for it, and manages to speak for everyman and everywoman without losing the voice of his sex, his class, and his time.

There could be more, but it already is bedtime.

Thanks for blogging. And you can skip Julián Ríos without a qualm. Really.