En la tierra baldia: Manuel Vazquez Montalban y la izquierda espanola en la postmodernidad

En la tierra baldía: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán y la izquierda española en
la postmodernidad. By MARI PAZ BALIBREA. [Mataró]: El Viejo Topo. 1999.
255 pp.

This study of one of the most prolific and polemical of contemporary
Spanish writers examines his literary work in relation to his political
commitment and intellectual activity during the late Francoist period, the
transition to democracy and the years of Socialist Government in Spain
(1982-95). Although it mentions his journalism at various stages, it is
not a full account of the totality of his work, but rather an analysis of
the interplay between his ideological stance and his fictional works,
including the Carvalho series. The title refers of course to Eliot's "The
Waste Land", a fundamental influence for Vázquez Montalbán the poet, but
here also used to refer to the crisis of late industrial capitalism as
conceived by the novelist. Balibrea takes his key concepts (such as memory
and desire) and explains them clearly and simply in terms of his life
experience and intellectual projects; memory is defined in terms of his
childhood among the defeated classes in post-Civil War Barcelona, and
desire in terms of the hope for a future vindication of the lost causes of
Spain's recent history. She also sets his work in the context of Spain's
place in the European and world order, specifically in relation to the
shift from modernity to post-modernity as it has conditioned the democratic
process in Spain. In addressing these issues there is an unfortunate
tendency to insert sometimes two or three very substantial endnotes into a
single sentence, making it almost impossible for the reader to follow the
argument.

In attempting to unravel the author's strategies in response to the
apparent defeat of the Left in Spain as elsewhere, Balibrea highlights his
simultaneous and problematic use of irony and realism; this is presented
as a symptom of the left-wing intellectual's loss of confidence in
interpreting post-modern reality, and the abandoning of the Marxist project
of radical social transformation. Both the novelist and his most
celebrated creation, Pepe Carvalho, are sustained in their respective
occupations by a Gramscian pessimism of reason and optimism of the will.
Only the first three Carvalho novels proper, Tatuaje (1974), La soledad del
manager (1977) and Los mares del sur (1979), are given detailed attention,
although their treatment is extremely interesting and challenging. Later
novels in the series are hardly referred to, except as a series which
progressively moves from the sexism detected in Tatuaje to a more
progressive treatment of female characters, and which identifies
remorselessly those responsible for the betrayal of left-wing ideals in
Spain. After El pianista (1985), Balibrea notes that the Carvalho series
is the focus of Vázquez Montalbán's project for recovering historical
awareness and memory in the face of democratic Spain's political amnesia,
and his use of "the specific poetics of neo-capitalist critical realism" to
achieve this. While acknowledging critiques of the detective genre for its
alleged underpinning of bourgeois and patriarchal values, she also
carefully attends to its transgressive and contestatory potential in the
hands of an "organic intellectual" whose mission is to create a critical
historical awareness among a popular readership. Although the analyses of
Galíndez and Autobiografía del general Franco carefully underline the
authorial task as a form of intervention in contemporary political reality,
the conclusion points up one of the fundamental contradictions which this
extraordinarily productive writer faces: he is at once one of Spain's best-
selling authors, yet his attempt to deploy literature in the cause of socio-
political change, and as an instrument for challenging the neo-liberal
orthodoxy of global post-modernity, is as critically unfashionable as ever.
Balibrea's book demonstrates his acute critical understanding of the role
and limitations of the intellectual in such endeavours.

Rob Rix
Trinity & All Saints College, Leeds
word count: 598 words (of text)