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12. Watching, Wanting, and the Gen X Soundtrack of Gabriela Bustelo's Veo Veo1
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203 u 12 Watching, Wanting, and the Gen X Soundtrack of Gabriela Bustelo’s Veo Veo1 Nina Molinaro While the precise contours of Spain’s Generation X remain hotly debated (and debatable)2 critics on both sides of the Atlantic have been quick to seize upon a specific subset of the generational cohort in order to illustrate Peninsular youth culture. This group has been described as hard realists, neorealists, or even dirty realists.3 Thus far most critical discussions of these writers have focused on novels by José Angel Mañas (and mostly his first novel) and Ray Loriga. The lone woman to be regularly admitted to the elite group is Lucía Etxebarria, who insists upon a feminine and feminizing vision of contemporary Spain, and whose considerable success hinges at least in part on her image management. Less well-known, Gabriela Bustelo articulates another feminine version of Generation X narrative. In particular, Veo Veo (1996)4 her first novel, continues and tests Etxebarria’s critique. Like other Spanish Gen X novelists, Bustelo populates Veo Veo with twenty-something urban consumers who look to sex, drugs, and contemporary popular music for stimulation, signposts, and significance. As with Mañas’s groundbreaking Historias del Kronen (1994), the action of Veo Veo is organized around the present-day nightclub scene in Madrid, and in both texts a first-person narrator/protagonist shifts from place to place in search of the next high. The two novels also insist upon referentiality, but Veo Veo teeters 204 NINA MOLINARO towards extravagance in its encyclopedic list of current films, actors, directors , TV shows, celebrities, Madrid landmarks, marketing icons, designers, and most importantly for my subsequent argument, recent popular music; in essence, the trauma of Bustelo’s novel unfolds to a veritable panoply of musical references that largely point towards American and British pop music from the 1980s. Moreover, while Veo Veo shares with many other Gen X novels an exacting commitment to popular culture, Spanish and otherwise, unlike these other novels, Bustelo’s text embeds the peripatetic journey of its female narrator /protagonist Vania Barcia within an elaborately articulated external threat that, in equal measure, propels the plot and the characters forward and resists narrative closure.5 Vania, whose identity is not revealed until mid-way through the novel, begins her odyssey (and, not coincidentally, the narration of her “talking cure”) by consulting with an unnamed male psychiatrist, in order to dispel the overriding sense that she has acquired an unwelcome and unknown stalker. The unnamed psychiatrist prescribes a vacation and sends Vania on her way, but when she exits his office she finds that she is again being shadowed by her stalker. She immediately hires Peláez, a private detective, who subsequently discovers hidden microphones and two-way mirrors in her apartment, video recording equipment in the neighboring apartment, and a slew of videotapes that document Vania’s most intimate moments in her bathroom and bedroom. In response to proof that she is indeed being actively monitored by someone , Vania sets off on a two-week spree, which lasts almost the duration of the novel, through Madrid’s fashionable (and not so fashionable) nightclubs, restaurants, and bars. In the process, she returns to former haunts, rekindles former friendships, and renews her former interest in alcohol and drugs. She also meets Ben Ganza, a mysterious Brazilian who unaccountably knows everyone she knows and shows up wherever she happens to be. Predictably, the pair embarks on an extended seduction. Much less predictably , in the final twenty pages of the novel, Vania mistakes her lover for an intruder and shoots him dead with Peláez’s gun. She then receives an anonymous letter that reveals Ben was in fact a jilted and vengeful ex-lover whom Vania had rejected several years prior to the narrative present. He had emigrated to Brazil, made his fortune, and undergone extensive plastic surgery after a motorcycle accident. When all the pieces of his plan were in place, he returned to Spain and, over the course of several years, thoroughly infiltrated her world. When Vania learns the extent and depth of the conspiracy plot against her, she comes undone, buys her own gun, and returns to her apartment intent on committing suicide. At the last minute she instead turns the gun towards one of [44.192.107.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:12 GMT) WATCHING, WANTING, AND THE GEN X SOUNDTRACK 205 the two-way mirrors and unintentionally kills Peláez...