Territorio Reverte: ensayos sobre la obra de Arturo Pérez-Reverte ed. By José Manuel López de Abiada, Augusta López Bernasocchi (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.1, 2004 231 Lorca's cohort which placed greater emphasis on personal response. Iarocci's tightly argued essay reads 'Los encuentros de un caracol aventurero' from Libro de poemas thematically and structurally as an allegory of maturation and secularization, while drawing together the personal, poetic, and political dimensions of Spanish modernity. Gala returns to gender when she shows how the 'Eros con baston' section of Can? ciones presents female stereotypes?the prude, the femme fatale, the spinster, etc.?as parodies of the muse. The segue to essays on Dali and Bunuel, Antonio Monegal's 'Shall the Circle Be Unbroken? Verbal and Visual Poetry in Lorca, Bunuel, and Dali' examines films, prose poems, and essays. Monegal has also written extensively and insightfully on these topics elsewhere, and greater cross-referencing might have directed interested readers further. In the single article exclusively on Dali, Pithamber R. Polsani connects the painter's paranoiac-critical method to studies by Lacan and Saussure. The writing is densely theoretical and devotes much space to the description of paintings. The two essays on Bunuel by Virginia Higginbotham and Sidney Donnell view the director along? side novelist Juan Goytisolo and fellow film-maker Pedro Almodovar, respectively. Higginbotham finds commonality of surrealist discourse, while Donnell advances a reasoned argument showing the modernist subject position fromwhich both directors embrace aspects of postmodernism. All in all, the articles often leave the reader wishing for more?more development, more analysis, more statement of the significance of the readings proposed. For ex? ample, Lima contends that Lorca was moving towards removing heterosexual males entirely from his plays, but also that the absence of men in Bernarda Alba occasions frustration, unhappiness, and death. What might this have meant for the direction of Lorca's theatre? In fact, Lorca was working on El sueno de la vida (i.e. Comedia sin titulo) simultaneously with Bernarda Alba, and though he only completed a portion , heterosexual men play a central role. In her discussion of Lorca's Andalusia, Poust might have trained a more critical eye on the essentialization of Eastern cul? ture by Spengler and Frank (and Lorca?) and, equally important, addressed the link between gypsies and sadness, violence, and death in Romancerogitano. If, as Delgado Morales observes, the needlewomen of Lorca's texts, with few exceptions, remain immobilized and resigned despite their efforts,and if Lorca associated himself with the domestic activity of sewing (textile=text), what does this imply about gendered work, gendered writing, and the genres of texts? The essays in this volume represent provocative points of departure for deeper questions. Illinois State University Maria T. Pao TerritorioReverte: ensayossobre la obrade Arturo Perez-Reverte. Ed. By Jose Manuel Lopez de Abiada and Augusta Lopez Bernasocchi. Madrid: Verbum. 2000. 500 pp. ?16.29. ISBN 84-7962-154-0. Arturo Perez-Reverte is Spain's nationally and internationally best-selling author. A long-time journalist and war correspondent, Perez-Reverte turned his hand to writ? ing fiction in the 1980s. His career as a writer has flourished since the publication of the 'intellectual' detective novels La tabla de Flandes and El club Dumas in the early 1990s and, with Las aventuras del capitdn Alatriste, a series of swashbuckling his? torical adventure novels set in seventeenth-century Spain, Perez-Reverte's narratives have become a publisher's dream, each new book guaranteeing sales of hundreds of thousands of copies. He is a professed ferventadmirer ofAlexandre Dumas, and most of his novels, which have been turned into (curiously unimpressive and unsuccessful) 232 Reviews films,have not only achieved the levels of popular success of the Frenchman but have also received very significant critical recognition both in Spain and abroad. Since 1993 Perez-Reverte has also established himself as one of Spain's foremost newspa? per columnists with his outspoken weekly columns for El Semanal. This volume, an initiative of Swiss Hispanism, is the firstever monograph dedicated to his work and to the various genres of writing he has cultivated, including novels, novellas, short stories, and newspaper columns. Thirty-two contributions by a diverse class of professionals, ranging from aca? demies (e.g. North American Hispanists such as Anthony Percival, Gonzalo Navajas , or Swiss and Spanish...