Sender 2001: Actas del congreso centenario celebrado en Sheffield by Anthony Trippett (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.3, 2004 817 Sender 2001: Actas del congreso centenario celebrado en Sheffield. Ed. by Anthony Trippett. Bristol: H/PLAM. 2002. xiv +187 pp. ?32. ISBN 0-86292-524-x. Conference proceedings occasionally compensate for lack of unity by range of treat? ment and the collection edited by Anthony Trippett presents some excellent historical and literary analysis of Ramon J. Sender's work, with interesting thematic surveys and a few 'sideways' glances at content. What the volume lacks most, perhaps, is an overall assessment ofthe author's place in world literature, although ithints that some of his early novels, notably Imdn (1930), rank near the top, while others, including Tupac Amaru (1973), do not. Francis Lough's scholarly discussion of how the Left perceived the experimental novelists of the 1920s and 1930s as bourgeois goes on to assess Sender's own attempts to write social novels with love as their essential theme, and the uncertain relation? ship between intellectual culture and proletarian spirit, a dichotomy/dilemma which he never resolved. Patricia McDermott's splendid study of the author's admiration for Valle-Inclan focuses on their use of the 'pelele', rag doll or puppet image, in Sender's case to depict the people as anonymous victims, exemplified by Viance, the living-dead soldier in Imdn. On the thematic level, Donatella Pini highlights persecution linking Requiem por un campesino espanol (1953) and El fugitivo (1972), wondering whether the latter somehow continues the former or whether the author simply reused parts of his earlier texts. Stephen Hart studies the figure and qualities of (non-military) subalterns as symbolizing the disproportion between the individual and (Aragonese) society, where landlords-people, powerful-powerless, rich-poor, and even CastilianAragonese inequality is reflected in language. Eduardo Godoy Gallardo examines the reality-fiction mixture in four novels in which today's reality is violent while the memory of yesterday is always gentle. Juan Carlos Zuazola's 'sideways' psychoanalytical portrayal of Sender as essentially an instinctive writer suggests some points that could be studied from a Freudian per? spective, such as the conflict between the forces of life and death. Shelley Godsland views the protagonist of La tesis de Nancy (1962), the American cultural tourist, as embodying the author's own literary frustration as an exile in the USA and his identification with the older Spanish men that gape at Nancy. Antonio Sanchez classifies Tupac Amaru as a historical essay, since it relates faithfully the historical facts of the Inca rebellion of 1780 against the Spanish colonial administration , and Margaret Turner considers Sender's portrayal of Lope de Aguirre, the sixteenth-century conquistador, as basically accurate, Aguirre having been, not mad, but irrational. For Jesus Vived Mairal, Sender was an uncomfortable anarchist in the early 1930s, becoming enthusiastic about the USSR during his 1933 visit, but breaking with Russia and Communism later, mainly because they did not share his feeling for 'lo humano'. On the whole, then, despite neglecting much of his work, the volume's sound li? terary analysis and interesting sidelights provide a dignified testimonial to Sender's literary standing a century after his birth. University of Salford Leo Hickey Postmodern Paletos: Immigration, Democracy, and Globalization in Spanish Narra? tive and Film, ig$o-2ooo. By Nathan E. Richardson. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 260 pp. $45. ISBN 0-8387-5498-8. Although the beginning of the title may seem somewhat puzzling, the words 'post? modern' and 'paletos' actually convey the main argument of the text, as they make ...