There is no other writer like Eduardo Mendoza (Barcelona, 1943). A true case. Not only for his books, which are numerous, but for himself. Because with books it happens as with houses, that reveal us. And Mendoza is like them. So skeptical and cheerful, besides the reverse of the pretentious and petulant writer, the back cover of vanity. Now, at the moment of receiving the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, his creative imposture has resurfaced in the Oviedo of the gala’s prolegomenas. That countdown with the name of Leonor and family. And he has taken as inspiration the most extravagant (and fascinating) of his universe, described with the precision of a topographer of letters by Llátzer Moix in Mundo Mendoza (2006).
Because see how one can explain that a bookstore-churro shop has been installed in the Plaza de la Fábrica, emulating the locales of his novels, with the lure, very fitting, that books are served like churros, the ones and the others. And it is not the only activity that has inspired the Catalan novelist. For just as the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han has awakened the desire for meditation, Mendoza’s work calls readers to a night of boleros with the strange intention of seeking the Golden Gate, just as in the uproarious No News from Gurb.
Furthermore, an alien game, the Gurb Project, and several Martian jazz concerts performed by the Tatooine Jazz Band, celebrating him as “one of the most read writers in the near, middle and far galaxies.” To finally land Mendoza at the Niemeyer Center in the neighboring Avilés, the most extraterrestrial of our architecture, on the occasion of the half-century of his Savolta.
In short, all this serves to describe the territory in which this narrator without limits or complexes, sharp and deliriously conventional, moves. He is our most British writer, for his innate elegance and his fine humor, but also our Balzac, for his mastery of all registers of the language, from the most cultivated to the most slangy. After all, he was a translator at the UN, a professor at Pompeu Fabra and Kafka and Cervantes Prize winner, two names that hit the center of his target. He also did not disdain the Planeta prize, which he won in 2010 with Riña de gatos. Madrid 1936. As always, nothing beats reading his books, with which he has scored goals in every literary arena. Here are these five.
The truth about the Savolta case (1975)
He has just turned 50 and is in peak form. This means it was published in the crucial year 1975, when Eduardo Mendoza was still in the United States, serving as a translator for the United Nations, and watching us from afar. The novel, the first of his fruitful and acclaimed career, is set in his Yoknapatawpha of sorts, which is not a territory invented as Faulkner’s, but his native Barcelona; reinvented, that is. But going back to 1918, with World War I as the backdrop and a weapons-manufacturing company in the foreground. This gives the author the opportunity to recreate the atmosphere of those years of workers’ uprisings, talk about the silenced gunmen, and introduce into the plot a series of serial crimes, starting with the industrialist Savolta, which will have to be unraveled.
Eduardo Mendoza is the writer of humor and social satire.
By the way, a portrait of the Catalan bourgeoisie and the underworld, with an antihero as protagonist, Javier Miranda. A boy from Valladolid, almost a Lazarus of the Pisuerga, who comes to the City of Barcelona to rise and finds himself up to his eyebrows in a complex network of corruption, blackmail and power struggles. A detective thriller with a complex plot, with different narrative voices and time jumps, seasoned with irony and humor, that ends up being a social narrative and of the customs of his time. Love and other demons do not miss their appointment. The foundations of what was going to be his narrative were already laid here. It was turned into a film by Antonio Drove in 1979, with José Luis López Vázquez as the reporter Domingo “Pajarito” Soto, Omero Antonutti and Ovidi Montllor in the cast.
The City of Marvels (1986)
Which is again another Barcelona, even more his own, in his own way. It also had its corresponding film (1998), by Mario Camus, which gave the leading roles to Emma Suárez and Olivier Martínez. It is his great novel, the one that placed him at the forefront of the new Spanish narrative of democracy, created a mythical metropolis and fostered a social phenomenon. The prodigies correspond to a city that was preparing to host the 1992 Olympic Games, reinventing itself in all respects. And it was so successful that even the future King, Felipe VI, bought it on Sant Jordi day in 1990 during his visit to Catalonia. And yes, it put Barcelona in fashion, turning Mendoza into something like its literary cicerone. Still, inevitably, he remains so.
The protagonist is Onofre Bouvila, a man of humble origin, ambitious and unscrupulous who arrives in the capital from inland Catalonia and makes a fortune, rising from below to reach the heights of power and influence. This occurs in the period between the two World’s Fairs of 1888 and 1929. As usual, in his pages the real city is merged with the fictitious, and above all with the one that lives in collective memory. Also, as is his habit, he gives everything in creating his supporting characters, who can be named Honesta Labroux, Canals i Formiga, Odón Mostaza, or Humbert Figa i Morera. And three-quarters the same in recreating daytime life with all its chiaroscuro, and at night, in the glow of great parties and the shadows of anarchist salons… Sniffing around dens and drawing rooms, it hardly matters.
No News from Gurb (1991)
We have already noted on occasion that the protagonist of No News from Gurb, as soon as he lands in the pre-Olympic Barcelona, transfigures himself into Marta Sánchez, at that moment in vogue. You know, she sang Soldiers of Love in 1990 aboard the frigate Numancia to encourage Spanish troops in the Persian Gulf. And Gurb, paradoxically, does it with the aim of going unnoticed. After all, he is an extraterrestrial. His mission partner, the alien who sets out to find him after losing his trail in the urban jungle, is as Giorgio Armani as the Duke of Olivares, Gary Cooper, the Duke of Kent and even Paquirrín.
The point is that the extraterrestrial must adapt to life on planet Earth, whose inhabitants, with their crushing logic, he does not understand. He is struck, for example, by the existence of rich and poor. And he writes it all down in a diary, which is what is read, point by point. To give one example, on day 10, the narrator notes that he has been run over by three cars and has fallen into four ditches because everything is under construction. Irony? A lot. And he stuffs himself with churros.
Eduardo Mendoza is the writer of humor and social satire.
According to Eduardo Mendoza, this is his most eccentric book, with no shadow of melancholy: “It is a look at the world that is astonished, a somewhat desolate point of view, but without any trace of tragedy or censorship.” It was originally published in serial form in the newspaper El País, and the novelist took it as a divertimento (a pastime), but it turns out that when viewed as a whole, it has depth as a portrait of present-day society and its circumstances.
The Adventure of the Ladies’ Hairdresser (2001)
The unnamed detective who had inaugurated the cycle with The Mystery of the Haunted Crypt (1979) continued in this one, after having done his mischief in The Labyrinth of the Olives (1982) and to keep after that in The Tangle of the Bag and Life (2012) and The Secret of the Lost Model (2015). We thus have an unnamed protagonist, the madman who left the asylum and is on the way to becoming an exemplary citizen; an unresolved crime, and post-Olympics Barcelona, a classic. Kafkaesque, Cervantine and sly, in Mendoza’s pure style.
This time, the Lazarus-born sleuth is seen as a temporary hairdresser, just as flamboyant but older and victim of a deception that he must investigate to save his skin. His sister Cándida is married to the lazy Viriato, a friend of philosophy and owner of the ladies’ hairdresser; a black chauffeur named Magnolio; the haute-society lady, christened Reinona, and the beautiful Ivet, with her indecent propositions. This detective installment is tangled but with a clear mind, delirious yet incisive, funny yet complex, and contains all the genius, though modest, of its creator.
Three Enigmas for the Organization (2024)
We are dangerously nearing the present. In this volume, our writer places us in the spring of 2022 in his eternal Barcelona, of course, when members of a secret government organization confront the investigation of three cases that may be related to each other or may not be. To know: the appearance of a corpse in a seedy hotel on Las Ramblas, El Indio Bravo; the disappearance of a British billionaire on his yacht, and the striking finances of Conservas Fernández. So the puzzle is there and it has to be solved.
To know what we are up against, it should be said that the Organization with a capital O, from the author of the nameless detective—let us not forget—was created in the middle of Franco’s regime and, as warned, fell into the limbo of the institutional bureaucracy of the democratic system. Now we see it in economic trouble, barely surviving and wandering along the margins of the law, populated by eccentric characters and heterogeneous, which is, we repeat, the specialty of this Cervantes Prize, which reinvents the detective genre by adding excess, criticism in the form of satire, humor and existential reflection.
No longer is it an unnamed Sherlock Holmes, but nine secret agents devoted to a triple investigation. The boss, a fanciful secretary, an agent who, facing signs of age, recites passages from an old manual of military tactics in archaic French, and in that plan. Again, as we have already seen with The Truth About the Savolta Case, the alleys and all the labyrinths of the antihero.
