Spain, a country where any conversation about literature tends to resemble a duel of erudition to see who can name the most Republican poets without choking on moral superiority, is currently celebrating the rise of two of its most loyal squires: Eduardo Mendoza, awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature; and Benjamín Prado, returning with the seventh installment of his literary detective series, this time on the trail of Juan Domingo Perón’s amputated hands. Because if there is one thing that unites these two literary heroes, it is their ability to turn traditional customs into high culture simply by putting on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and speaking ill of the Nordics.
Mendoza has been awarded the prize by a jury convinced that humor, when accompanied by references to recent history, counts as depth. He has been praised for the “reflective approach” of his work, which basically consists of saying that if you are rich, why do you need philosophy and religion? A thesis as brilliant as shouting to the sky, “I’ve got money, give me back my angst!” with a glass of vermouth in your hand.
Meanwhile, Prado has decided that the best way to write noir is to dress it up in formal attire and fill it with historical memory, traveling mummies, and recycled dictators. “I’m sick of Nordic writers with a lot of gore and little subtlety,” he complains. The professor-detective saga does not investigate crimes, it interrogates history, shakes it up, gets it drunk, and throws it into a basement of the DGS with a lamp hanging over it. It tells us about 23F, the sewers of the state, foreign dictatorships, and those Iberian coincidences where poets end up as actors and actors end up on the Planeta lists.
Both writers represent the culmination of a very national phenomenon: the mixture of autobiography and cultural heroism. One mocks everyone while remaining one of their own. The other turns his alter ego into a detective who coincidentally investigates the same things he denounces in columns and interviews.
And yet, the Iberian literary system—so proud of its navel—adores them. Because there is something deeply comforting about these figures who, without any pretensions of novelty, continue to reaffirm that what we have is important. That Barcelona has more layers than Copenhagen. That 23F was a better thriller than anything written in Iceland. If you quote Dylan, Sabina, and Rafael Alberti in the same interview, you automatically become a cultural icon, even if your novel is about diplomatic necrophilia.
In a country where prestige is built more on longevity than innovation, these gentlemen of the pen are already patron saints of literature with pedigrees. In a country where prestige is built more on longevity than innovation, these gentlemen of the pen are already patron saints of literature with pedigrees. As much as they write books, they dictate emotional bulletins for a generation that still believes that the Transition was the narrative climax of the West. One draws humor from the cracks of Francoism, the other has his detective spy on Isabelita Perón from a car. They are chroniclers of the recent past and the confusing present, those two favorite times of a Spain that has not yet overcome Franco or the singer-songwriters of the 1970s.
And what can we say about the awards? While Mendoza will be crowned in Oviedo by Their Majesties—because without royalty, there is no consecration—Prado continues to collect awards that are handed out with the lightness of a cookie at a neighborhood meeting.
In short, Spain is in luck. Two of its writers are still going strong, writing novels that in other countries would be historical pamphlets, but here they are dressed up to be celebrated as high literature. One laughs from his palace of irony; the other rehearses his role as an actor while his detective recites history in a soft, accusatory voice.
And so, amid so many awards and phrases of intrinsic intelligence, Spanish fiction looks in the mirror and says, very seriously and with conviction: “We’re doing great, aren’t we?”
From a distance—there is fog and the continent is isolated—I have always been fascinated by this very Spanish tendency to take themselves seriously even when they laugh. Isn’t there a kind of baroque tragedy disguised as an intellectual joke in all this?
