Tag Archives: Spanish literature

RIP Mario Vargas Llosa (1936 – 2025)

De Zuid-Amerikaanse schrijver Mario Vargas Llosa sterft.

Op de cover van het boek staat ‘Dans la chapellerie’ van Edgar Degas uit de Thyssen-Bornemisza collectie

Jahsonic, naast hoofddoodgraver van Dodenstad ook zelfverklaard erotomaan en pornosoof, kan het maar over een ding hebben. Llosa’s niet zo bekende maar toch zeer geprezen opstel van boeklengte De eeuwigdurende orgie (1975) waarover Joost Zwagerman optekent:

‘In de overvloed aan literatuur over Madame Bovary kom je helaas maar zelden iets tegen over het mannelijke van en in Emma Bovary. Mario Vargas Llosa is een van de weinigen die zich erin hebben verdiept. In De eeuwigdurende orgie benadrukt Vargas Llosa dat er achter die bevalligheid van Emma soms ‘een echte kerel’ schuilgaat.’

De orgie uit de titel van dat opstel verwijst naar wat Flaubert in 1858 in een brief naar een zekere Marie-Sophie schrijft:

‘Alleen door zich te verliezen in de literatuur als in een eeuwigdurende orgie kan een mens het bestaan verdragen.’

Rust zacht Mario.

RIP Almudena Grandes (1960 – 2021)

Trailer from The Ages of Lulu

Almudena Grandes was a Spanish writer best-known for her novel The Ages of Lulu (1989), a classic of Spanish erotica.

Bigas Luna adapted the novel to a film of the same name a year later.

RIP Antonio Escohotado (1941 – 2021)

Antonio Escohotado was a Spanish philosopher and writer. I discovered him through his A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age which was written in Spanish in 1989 and translated to English in 1996.

On the cover of one Spanish edition is The Smoker by Joos van Craesbeeck (photo).

RIP Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964 – 2020)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón was a Spanish novelist best known for his 2001 novel The Shadow of the Wind, the most successful novel in Spanish publishing history after Don Quixote.

The novel starts with the sentence:

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”

That first sentence is reminiscent of the first sentence of Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967):

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Once the boy is taken to this library with his father, this is what he sees, a library which has been compared to The Library of Babel (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges:

“The man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a virtual basilica of shadows spiraling up under a high glass dome, its dimness pierced by shafts of light that stabbed from above. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked.
“Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.”

When you read the obituaries of Zafón, you read a lot about frustration of being a bestseller author lacking critical acclaim.