related to Juan Benet (Madrid, 1927-1993) received few, if any, critical acclaim and commentators. His works have had few sales, and before they are reprinted, his works should be sought in second-hand bookstores and libraries. Having said that, I would not hesitate to place him among the top three or four writers of the 20th century. In compulsory reading, Felix de Azua “Benet, Valle Inclán and Ferlosio are the only concrete cases of truly modern literary inventions that the Castilian narrative has ever offered,” he comments. But if so, which it is, why does Benet fail with readers? The truth is, there is no shortage of reasons. It’s in character, in Benet himself, and in his literature. But let’s go in sections.
Those who knew him at brothel and tavern nights, Gijón coffee and Gambrinos in BocaccioThey say that Benet drank bad wine and had an intelligence that could be pedantic, insulting, ironic, sarcastic, and offensive. Benet was, so to speak, a scumbag scary. And he didn’t care if his works didn’t sell. The engineer of roads, canals, and ports earned his lentils by building marshes and could write as he wished. By the way, it was not at all. His conscientious and uncompromising literature leads with technical resources that surprise with an almost impossible harmony between technique and art. It is true that his writings are hermetic, cryptic, and labyrinthine—not by will but by necessity—a shameless challenge for the most daring reader. Some of your texts require a bit of persistence to get past the first ten or twelve pages. The title of the first short story book is already a warning to sailors, ‘You will never be anything’. Because there was no publisher willing to publish it, Benet had to publish it. 12,000 pesetas of time to print a thousand-odd copies of the first edition. Which was not sold.
In Benet’s writings, when, among other things, he has a global vision of the subject he will be covering, he begins the story at the very edge of the story: Its beginning begins at the very edge of the story. the reader has to pull to solve the ordeal. Reading Benet will set you on a journey that seems to have no destination. But there is. The problem is that at the end of the journey, the narrative turns into a Guadiana of many detours, going up and down, self-reflecting and retreating, going underground, through complex labyrinths, to reach an uncanny coherence. where everything makes sense and nothing remains. Puzzle pieces fit together and the narrative becomes a delicate clockwork. This is the reward for the effort of the reader who passes the test. It must be said, however, that not all Benetian writings are equally difficult. Just go to journalistic collaborations in Revista de Occidente, Cuadernos para el diálogo, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Triunfo magazine and El País. And ‘The air of a crime’, one of his works that was a finalist for the Planeta award, makes it clear that Benet has a talent for creating bestsellers. It is something different to go into the marrow of his production in works like this. “Civil Prose”, “Max”, “Angel of the Lord”, “A meditation”, “Rusty spears”, “Winter trip”, “Before Saul Samuel” or “You will return to the Zone”. In most of Benet’s novels, he reminds me of Faulkner, Beckett, Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, and also Rulfo. All, like him, are hard-to-crack walnuts. Benet rejects the hollow rhetoric and yawning picture of nineteenth-century realism with an aesthetic vision based on the enigmas inherent in the human condition.
lyric artillery
Of course, the difficulty of reading is not only in one aspect. On the one hand, language adventure, lyric Artillery, convoluted writing with extreme sentences, endless sentences and derivatives, parentheses, intermediate words, and footnotes. All this leaves the reader breathless, lost in a maze that he has to solve before he can find the exit, of course there are and surprises. These lethal formal and constructive strategies bring the reader to the end of their patience with Saul before Samuel. You can’t get more cleverly warped and paradoxically brighter. In any case, the problem is not just the form. It’s in the content. Because Benet is so monothematic that it can cause boredom. Obsessive and repetitive, meanwhile, he returns repeatedly to the Civil War and the post-war era, where few people act like him. He had reason to focus a significant portion of his writing on the Spanish conflict based on the fratricide. His father was shot by anarchists and dumped his body in a ditch. But make no mistake. ‘Región’ in ‘Volverás a Región’, Big workis Spain. But it’s not a physical space, it’s a mythical and symbolic place, a spirit place ruled by an all-destroying evil god.
What Benet is really talking about is failure, loneliness, absurdity, irrationality and the incomprehensible human condition. You Will Return to the Zone is considered a founding text by cult readers, critics, and authors such as Gimferrer, Azúa, Sabater, Javier Marías, and Pombo, and many others. And since no one is a prophet in his own country, Benet of The Times (January 18, 1993) Proust, Faulkner and Joyce. And to close these notes – the contradictions of life – is an interesting anecdote: Benet, who so viciously attacked the so-called Galdosya Iberian chickpea, finally turned that literary gem into his most widely read work. “Autumn in Madrid” In 1950, it’s definitely a traditional text. The things that happened.