History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (review)

Kathryn Everly's History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel analyzes thematic parallels between recent Spanish historical and Generation X novels. Despite their differences, Everly argues that both genres provide useful insights that help us to better understand history, violence, and the impact of globalization in contemporary Spain. The introduction considers recent Spanish novels from a postmodern perspective to show how their authors continue to redefine narrative techniques and literary styles in their work. Everly reviews Generation X's focus on media and violence, the fictional representation of history, different assessments of high and low culture, and the relationship between culture and the self in order to emphasize the various ways that historical and Generation X novels help to construct a more complete image of Spanish identity. For Everly, both genres create a kind of literary hyperreality that significantly impacts the readers' understanding of contemporary Spanish culture.

Part 1 focuses on the work of three authors who explore the challenges of representing history in novelistic form. Chapter 1 studies Carme Riera's Dins el darrer blau (1994), which retells the history of the persecution of seventeenth-century Mallorcan Jews by the Spanish Inquisition from the point of view of the victims. Everly relates René Girard's theory of sacrificial violence to several female characters in the novel to demonstrate how patriarchal Spain has consistently subordinated women to masculine discourse. The artistic retelling of the past gives a fresh voice to marginalized subcultures, which helps readers to better understand similar prejudices that continue to exist in the present. In chapter 2, Everly traces a search for personal identity as the narrator of Riera's La meitat de l'ànima (2004) investigates her mother's mysterious past. In a self-conscious style that purposefully mixes fact with fiction, the novel examines the connections between storytelling and the representation of history. Umberto Eco's theory of the model reader informs Riera's privileging of reader participation, which, in turn, destabilizes the relationship between author, implied author, narrator, and reader throughout the novel.

In chapter 3, Dulce Chacón's La voz dormida (2002) examines various experiences of women during and after the Spanish Civil War. Chacón juxtaposes official documents with artistic passages throughout her text to highlight the roles of factual and fictional discourse in the rewriting of history. The novel demonstrates that all kinds of documentation (letters, notes, government documents, photographs, and oral testimonies) should be taken into account in order to construct a more complete image of the past. Chapter 4 uses a Nietzschian approach to study the representation of heroes in Javier Cercas's Soldados de Salamina (2001) and La velocidad de la luz (2005). Both works focus on the role of the narrator/protagonist who struggles to write intriguing versions of past events, creating a tension between fact and fiction that emphasizes the importance of narration in the process of recovering historical memory. Cercas's work suggests that fictionalization can advance the recreation of history, and that modern notions of "truth" are intrinsically related to the act of writing: "The art of writing something 'real' depends on the fabrication of a good story" (99).

Part 2 analyzes texts by Ray Loriga, Lucía Etxebarria, and José Ángel Mañas, the three most prominent Spanish Generation X authors, who explore the relationships between cultural production, globalization, and identity formation in their work. Everly connects their focus on audiovisual culture with Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities and Jean Baudrillard's theories about hyperreality to show how Generation X novels generally depict the challenges of constructing a coherent sense of self in a world dominated by various forms of media.

In chapter 5, Everly compares Ray Loriga's Caídos del cielo (1995) to its film adaptation La pistola de mi hermano (1997), which calls attention to the impact of images on identity and on their relationship...