"The Op-Ed Novel not only elegantly recounts a vital
intellectual and cultural history of post-Franco Spain. Carefully
exploring the careers of Spain's most eminent writers, it
demonstrates, too, the osmotic links between political journalism and
literary fiction--salutary reading in the English-speaking countries,
where politics and literature are still regarded as strangers to each
other."--Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide
A new history of
contemporary Spanish fiction through the prism of novelists'
newspaper columns.
Public
intellectuals come in many different stripes, but most of them gain a
following at least in part from their writing, whether in the form of
magazine articles, newspaper columns, or full-length nonfiction. A
few--James Baldwin and Joan Didion are celebrated examples--start out
as novelists before turning to the rough-and-tumble of current
affairs. In The Op-Ed Novel, Bécquer Seguín undertakes the
first book-length study of how contemporary literature is shaped by
opinion journalism, focusing on fiction writers who took to the
papers in post-Franco Spain and became stewards of their country's
cultural, economic, and political future.
Following
Spain's transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
internationally acclaimed novelists such as Javier Cercas, Antonio
Muñoz Molina, and Javier Marías seized the opportunity to populate
the opinion pages of the newly legal free press. The Op-Ed Novel
analyzes how the argumentative styles and preoccupations of their
columns in El País, Spain's most widely read daily, bled into their
fiction. These and other authors used their novels to settle scores
with fellow intellectuals, make speculative historical claims, and
advance partisan political projects. At the same time, their literary
technique greatly invigorated opinion journalism.
A
lively guide to the terroir of contemporary Spanish literature, The
Op-Ed Novel offers a bird's-eye view of both the post-Franco
intellectual climate and the changing role of the novelist in public
life.