Rafael Chirbes Research Articles

Collapsed Modernities in the Twenty-First-Century Southern European Novel

ABSTRACT With a focus on a contemporary corpus of twenty-first-century Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek fiction that questions the peripheralization of these countries in European discourse, this essay aims to discuss Southern Europe as a literary space. Published around the 2008 financial crisis, these novels capture how the crisis’s onset precipitated the demise of a set of cultural, political, and institutional values previously taken for granted. Despite their national and local specificities, novels such as O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas (2002) by Lídia Jorge, Crematorio (2007) by Rafael Chirbes, Psomi, paideia, eleftheria (2012) by Petros Markaris, and I Chironi trilogy by Marcello Fois, critically reflect upon the long-standing realities of unequal development, historical hierarchies, and ambiguous positions within Europe, as well as upon deep-rooted orientalist perceptions of Europe’s South. A major trope cross-cuts these four novels: the so-called “economic miracles” of the second half of the twentieth century and their economic, political, cultural and environmental destructive drift as a major consequence of the accelerated modernization of late capitalism. Through our case studies, we develop our formal argument by exploring a crucial shared plot trigger: the death of a character as a metaphor for the ruins of a fading or collapsed modernity.

Screening Older Men: Aging Men’s Sexualities in Contemporary Spanish Cinema and TV Series

Older men’s sexualities have recurrently been defined as either “asexual” or “in decline.” Their sexualities, when/if represented at all, have also been associated with the “dirty old man” stereotype, which has depicted sex in old age as both unpalatable and grotesque. Delving into these (mis)representations, this article offers an overview of representations of older men’s sexual lives in contemporary Spanish cinema and TV series, which seem to reify but also challenge such stereotypes. Thus, for example, both the classic film El abuelo by José Luis Garci and the highly acclaimed animation movie Arrugas by Ignacio Ferreras, based on Paco Plaza’s graphic novel of the same title, present the older men in an old people’s home as eminently asexual, while the TV series Crematorio, based on Rafael Chirbes’ homonymous novel, focuses on the relationship between an aging (heterosexual) man and a younger woman, which thus seems to reinforce the traditional “dirty old man” stereotype. Yet Salvador Calvo’s “El trasplante,” one of the episodes of the recent remake of Chicho Ibáñez-Serrador’s well-known horror TV series Historias para no dormir, appears to turn the stereotype upside down, featuring a dystopian story of an older woman who grows increasingly apart from her suddenly rejuvenated lifelong husband. Movies such as En la ciudad sin límites, on the other hand, question rigid (hetero)sexual binaries as the dying older male protagonist, a supposedly straight husband and father, is finally revealed as bisexual, while Eloy de la Iglesia’s Los novios búlgaros depicts a middle-aged man’s attachment to a younger boy, who ends up marrying his girlfriend. Using the character of Salvador Mallo as his alter-ego, Pedro Almodóvar’s (semi-)autobiographical Pain and Glory also focuses on gay aging, redefining it as a queer” rather than linear or “straight” temporal experience (Halberstam), while one of the latest Spanish horror films, Malasaña 32, revolves around a house inhabited by a ghost whose traumatic past as a transgender person living under the Francoist regime comes back to haunt the present. Whilst exploring a number of selected films and TV series that seem to conform to conventional images of older men’s sexual lives, this article will thus include alternative film representations that also undermine such limited and limiting images, thereby redefining aging men’s sexualities on the contemporary Spanish screen as much more complex and plural than has been acknowledged.

Lejana y rosa by Rosario Izquierdo

Reviewed by: Lejana y rosa by Rosario Izquierdo Ana M. López-Aguilera Rosario Izquierdo Lejana y rosa Barcelona. Comba. 2021. 290 pages. CARMEN, a thirty-six-year-old professor, visits her hometown, Tarsis, a mining town in the province of Huelva in southern Spain. The return brings back memories of the summer she turned seventeen, a summer marked by the accidental death of her father, her first forays as a writer, as well as her conflictive love relationships with Julián, school boyfriend, and Álvaro G., famous writer residing temporarily in the area. Carmen’s return offers her the opportunity to make peace with those events and move on with her life. Lejana y rosa (Far and pink) is more than a novel about the personal problems of a woman in crisis. It recovers the working-class memory of the region with its history of class conflicts, fights for emancipation, and working-class solidarity. Through the experiences of a teenaged Carmela (Carmen’s nickname as an adolescent), the book discusses two key moments in the history of Spain: the decade of the 1920s that prepared the way for the advent of the Second Republic in April 1931, and [End Page 75] the change from Franco’s dictatorship to a liberal democracy in the 1970s (a period known as Transición). On one hand, the conflicts in the 1920s between the British Company, owner of the mines in Tarsis, and the Spanish miners become the background of the novel that Carmela starts to write that summer. The mining conflicts make up the subject in the essay Álvaro is writing and the memories her abuela Concha shares. The stories of love, adultery, and suicide that Carmela researches for her novel serve to foreground social and political issues such as ownership of resources, foreign interference in the Spanish economy, political corruption, environmental degradation, and poverty. On the other hand, the young Carmela lives the Transición, when Spain moves from a dictatorship to a liberal democracy. While Carmela’s relatives and neighbors contemplate such change with unrestrictive optimism, her lover and mentor, Álvaro G., offers a more sober view. During his conversations with the protagonist, in articles and interviews mentioned in the novel, Álvaro points out the limitations of the Transición to satisfy the demands of the populace for changes leading to a more equal distribution of wealth and power in Spain. Lejana y rosa combines personal and social history in a fiction that defines a social and political conflict. In doing so, Izquierdo aligns with a political trend in contemporary Spanish literature alongside authors such as Rafael Chirbes, Isaac Rosa, and Belén Gopegui. After the publication of Diario de campo and El hijo zurdo, this third novel by Izquierdo confirms her literary trajectory as a politically committed author. Ana M. López-Aguilera Bemidji State University Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today

The Greying of Sex: Ageing Men’s Sexualities in Contemporary Spanish Fiction

Traditionally, (men’s) sexualities have been dissociated from old age, stereotyped as ‘asexual’ or ‘in decline’. They have even been seen as unpalatable, conforming to the ‘dirty old man’ stereotype. Questioning these (mis)representations, this paper focuses on contemporary Spanish novels that challenge such dichotomous images, redefining ageing men’s sexualities as much more complex than has been acknowledged. It thus follows, that if Rafael Chirbes and Marta Sanz focus on the relationship between ageing men and younger women, other texts by writers like Álvaro Pombo and Luis Antonio de Villena complicate ageing gay men’s sexualities along race, class and gender lines.

Ethos of confinement: space and characters in En la orilla by Rafael Chirbes (2013)

Este es un estudio dedicado específicamente al espacio y a los personajes de la novela En la orilla (Anagrama, 2013) de Rafael Chirbes (1949-2015). En los márgenes de una dimensión espacial asfixiante, fruto de la imaginación diegética del autor, los personajes-narradores sufren un proceso de destrucción de su ethos contenido en discursos que se caracterizan por su condición de incomunicabilidad entre sí: solo el lector recibe la enunciación de la que, por tanto, es el único testigo. Alegoría de la época contemporánea, este texto es una pieza en la obra novelística de un autor que, tras su muerte, sigue contribuyendo a la práctica de la novela realista en el siglo XXI.

Rafael Chirbes's En la orilla : Allegories of Cryptic Transgenerational Trauma

Rafael Chirbes's 2013 novel En la orilla is a paradigm of transgenerational trauma, focusing on the protagonist's relationship with his father following the Spanish Civil War. Two figures, the marshland and the calendar, are read allegorically to understand the complexities of trauma, a phenomenon that calls for articulation at the same time as it resists representation.

La biblioteca de la Fundación Rafael Chirbes: Anotaciones y marcas de lectura

Los más de siete mil libros de la Fundación Rafael Chirbes, radicada en la casa de Beniarbeig (Alicante) en la que el escritor pasó los últimos quince años de su vida, contienen abundantes anotaciones, marcas, subrayados y comentarios. En este artículo se establece una primera tipología de estos textos que aportan novedades sobre la personalidad, el proceso creativo y la fecunda intertextualidad de las obras literarias, ensayísticas y periodísticas del autor. Con ello se pretende atraer también la atención de diferentes especialistas para que evalúen los hábitos de lectura de Chirbes por épocas, períodos, autores, disciplinas, temáticas, asuntos, motivos, etc.

Eastern European Immigrants in the Spanish Crisis Novel: Crematorio by Rafael Chirbes and La carne by Rosa Montero

Crematorio by Rafael Chirbes (2007) and La carne by Rosa Montero (2016) belong to the expanding genre of the Spanish crisis novel that arose in response to the global economic crisis of 2007–2009. The novels’ protagonists realize that neoliberalism is eroding the institutions associated with the welfare state model. These characters attempt to exorcise the anxieties that the crisis awakens in them by projecting them onto Eastern European immigrants, whom they associate with the depredations of savage capitalism in their countries of origin. Rather than casualties of globalization, immigrants are seen as emissaries of the new economic order that fosters fluidity and rootlessness, and are blamed for the hardship created by the structures of exploitation that are implicit within late capitalism.

Funciones narrativas e ideológicas de los personajes de inmigrantes y de sus descendientes en la narrativa española

The present paper is aimed to analyze how certain concepts of political identity are translated into poeticsof identity in contemporary Spanish narrative. The analysis covers four novels published since 1998,written by Spanish authors and which achieved high rates of sales and positive critical recognition. Thestudy was not limited to specific immigrant groups in order to reflect a variety of experiences and politicalpositions represented in the texts. The paper is a study of the image and functions of immigrantcharacters in selected Spanish novels of the last three decades: Háblame, musa, de aquel varón (1998) by Dulce Chacón, Ventajas de viajar en tren (2000) by Antonio Orejudo, Cosmofobia (2007) by Lucía Etxebarria and En la orilla (2013) by Rafael Chirbes. Sociologists and psychologists indicate three main classes of negative attitudes towards immigrants (citizen insecurity, threat to cultural identity and competitiveness in obtaining resources). Within this context the article aims to determine to what extent the literary representations of immigrant characters constitute reproductions or transgressions of culturally prefabricated images of the Other and explores the different narrative and ideological functions these characters play. The paper also studies the presence of discourses that support social exclusion of immigrants and the means of subverting them.

Habla el policía: Polifonia novelesca y debate democrático en algunas novelas españolas sobre el franquismo y la Transición

The Policeman Speaks: Novel Polyphony and Democratic Debate in Some Spanish Novels about Francoism and the Transition In recent years a new orientation in the Spanish political memory (a shift from the tendency towards forgetting conflicts to the claims for recognition for all victims) can also be noticed in a significant number of literary works. Many novels offer a broad coverage of social discourses and engage in the process of negotiations over a critical period in the 20th century history of Spain, namely the “Transition” from the late francoism era to democracy. This paper analyses fragments of three contemporary novels (La caída de Madrid by Rafael Chirbes, El vano ayer by Isaac Rosa, and El día de mañana by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón) whose authors give voice to an ambiguous character -- a policeman from the Francoist period. He makes attempts to justify his work and his support for the regime. These fictional utterances are studied from the perspective of certain theories of literary dialogism and literary poliphonic devices. The final question is whether it is reasonable to expect any social impact of such literary representations of “democratic” dialogues.

El exiliado en la Transición española y polaca. Crematorio de Rafael Chirbes y Niskie Łąki de Piotr Siemion

The exiled in Spanish and Polish transition. Crematorio by Rafael Chirbes and Niskie Łąki by Piotr SiemionThe aim of the article is to present a picture of the exiled in a society undergoing processes of democratic transformation on the basis of Crematorio 2009, a novel by Rafael Chirbes, and Niskie Łąki by Piotr Siemion 2000. The author employs a research method from comparative literature and refers to the category of supranationality “supranacionalidad” proposed by Claudio Guillén, a Spanish comparativist. An analysis of the texts indicates that the presence of the exiled, notwithstanding fundamental differences concerning e.g. the evaluation of capitalism, serves to extract and highlight the end of great narrations which accompanies transformation processes: in the Spanish novel it is the end of ideology communism and history F. Fukuyama whereas Niskie Łąki refers to the end of the romantic paradigm M. Janion.

Tales of the Brick Age: Corruption and Bankruptcy in the Late Works of Rafael Chirbes

Tales of the Brick Age:Corruption and Bankruptcy in the late works of Rafael Chirbes Alberto Ribas-Casasayas (bio) The subprime collapse, the Global Recession, and the Eurozone crisis have given rise to an entire subgenre of crisis narratives in literary and visual arts, attempting to make sense of the human aspect, causes and outcomes of the largest non-war economic commotion in the West since the Great Depression. In Spain, the last two novels of Rafael Chirbes (1949-2015), Crematorio (2007) and En la orilla (2013)1 have distinguished themselves for an insightful view and poignant reflections on the real estate boom and bust, which defined the economic and cultural parameters of Spain after the democratic transition. Here I will call this period the Brick Age.2 As a metonymy, the Brick refers here to a series of interrelated factors, economic developments, social changes, evolving cultural attitudes, and substantial alterations in visual landscape and the environment, which took place in Spain from the mid-1980s to approximately 2010. It takes after the so-called "fiebre del ladrillo" or "Brick Fever," i.e. the construction boom starting approximately in the late 90s, defining an economy largely based on real estate development and related sectors, including tourism, along with the rapid, unsustainable economic growth it fostered, supported by the gradual imposition of neoliberal ideology and policy by the right and its implicit acceptance by the traditional left. In the following pages I will produce a brief account of the Brick Age as a historical process in two phases, underscoring the ties of the boom and bust economy with a culture of corruption. Having established this context, I will proceed to introduce Chirbes' novels, justify the need for a joint analysis, [End Page 405] and discuss the concepts and imagery that seek to account for the political, cultural, and moral context intertwined with the economics of boom and bust during the Brick Age. The Brick Age: A Brief History The Brick Age started in the mid-1980s, with the development of what came to be colloquially known as the "cultura del pelotazo"—roughly translatable to "fast money culture." "Pelotazos" relate to a time where, given the right political connections with the recently elected PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), it became easy to become rich in real estate development and related sectors, especially in the capital Madrid and the coastal areas. The "pelotazo" era culminates with the large institutional investments following the winning bids of Barcelona, Seville, and Madrid as hosts for the Olympic Games, the World Fair, and European Cultural Capital in 1992. This phase of the Brick Age is best embodied by the banker Mario Conde, whose career came to an abrupt end in 1993 under public accusations of embezzlement, and by the expensive mansion shared by former minister of finance Miguel Boyer with his partner, the socialite Isabel Preysler. This house, which came to be jokingly known as "Villa Meona" or "Pissing Villa" because of its 13 toilets, embodied the contradictions between proclaimed social-democratic politics and the lavish lifestyle that involvement with the party could entail given the right connections. After the brief economic crisis that broke out in 1993, the "get rich quick" mentality of the "pelotazo" years reignited in 1998 under the government of the conservative party. A significant change in land development laws ("Ley de Suelo") gave regional and municipal administrations wide-ranging control over the privatization of public and rustic areas. This signals the beginning of what is popularly known in Spain as "La fiebre del ladrillo" ("The Brick Fever") itself, a long financial bubble, largely sustained by private mortgage lending, that peaked in the late 2000s, when private debt reached 1.77 trillion euros, nearly two times the national GDP. Although the changes in "Leyes de Suelo" were ostensibly aimed at reducing real estate prices, the opposite happened instead. Local administrations had a double incentive to speculate with land and facilitate insider deals: first, "recalificaciones" ("re-zoning") had become a major source of funding; second, the consequent growth in urban development and associated services became an easy source of jobs that would have significant electoral returns for the parties in power. Early in the...

Lucretius in the novel Crematorio by Rafael Chirbes

This article explores the influence of Lucretius on the novel Crematorio (2007) by the Valencian novelist Rafael Chirbes (1949-2015). Considered one of the best Spanish novelists of the 21st century, Chirbes acknowledged in several interviews the Lucretian influence on his novel and, indeed, among the funds of his library, there was a De rerum natura profusely underlined by his own hand, which will guide us in the search for concrete resonances from the Roman Epicurean. Chirbes shares Lucretius’ materialistic view of universe and uses his writings to denounce the vices of society, with a purpose of moral reform. The main motifs adapted from Lucretius are the general materialist concept of life and universe, the human being as dust, the eternal recycling of the universe’s matter and of living beings, the violence in sex, the Hell in life, and the rebuttal of wealth as a factor of evils.

Cabeza de ofidio, ojos de reptil: a propósito de Paris-Austerlitz, de Rafael Chirbes

El artículo discute la última novela del escritor valenciano Rafael Chirbes, Paris-Austerlitz. Se cuenta en esta novela el encuentro durante 1986, en un París sórdido, naturalista, entre un maduro obrero francés especializado y un joven español de familia acomodada aspirante a pintor. La desigual relación que mantienen, territorio propicio para la lucha de clases, transitará por la pasión, el interés, los celos y el desamor, aunque la aparición de la plaga, del mal, llevará a quien más se entrega, al menos pragmático de los dos, a la muerte”

Imágenes de redención en Rafael Chirbes: la religión animal

This work contains a theological approach to the history and stories of Rafael Chirbes, paying attention to the relationship showed between human and non-human animals, attending to their identification, their blurred boundaries, and their defacement. Section one studies the strange communion among them as it appears in Mimoun, and, next, its reversal in Los disparos del cazador. We also study the mystical via in En la orilla to conclude by suggesting the possibility of a historical redemption departing from these texts.

Intertextualidad y estrategias traductoras. Sobre algunas versiones de un pasaje de En la orilla (Rafael Chirbes, 2013)

Esta breve nota avanza algunas observaciones sobre cómo las recientes traducciones alemana, italiana, francesa e inglesa de la novela de Rafael Chirbes En la orilla (2013) han abordado un pasaje especialmente rico en referencias intertextuales (la Biblia, Villon, Manrique).

The Economic Degeneration of Masculinity in Rafael Chirbes's En la orilla

Rafael Chirbes's En la orilla has been proclaimed as “la novela de la crisis,” and it has garnered an impressive amount of distinction in the short length of time since its publication in May 2013. It was voted the 2013 novel of the year by readers of El País, and in January 2014 it won the Premio Francisco Umbral, as well as reaching its fifth edition. Unsparingly critical, En la orilla forms an integral part of the cultural requestioning of social values in the wake of the Spanish crisis, “la literatura de la crisis,” which stresses the human and material consequences of the suspension of human values stemming from the social endorsement of market imperialism. En la orilla thematizes the corrosion of moral character during Spain's economic boom, in its multiple forms, such as selfishness, disregard for the elderly, and arrant mercenariness, while also fictionalizing neoliberal Spain's exclusion of immigrants and the poor. Integral to Chiribes's historically contextualized critique of the recession, and the object of my study, is a perceptive vision of the historical degeneration of masculinity from the Second Republic, 1931–1936, to the present day. This article will first provide a brief overview of “la literatura de la crisis,” while the second part illumines the economic and ideological distortion of the father–son relationship in this novel.

City present in city past: Rafael Chirbes’ cartographic imaginary

Abstract This article examines Rafael Chirbes’ 1994 novel Los disparos del cazador in relationship to important transformations of Madrid’s built environment from the 1940s to the middle of the 1990s. Using as a point of departure the groundbreaking work of the geographer David Harvey on the relationships between cultural production and urban process, this article offers a model for analysis that bridges the gap between the humanities and social sciences and in so doing offers a reading that demonstrates how Chirbes’ text weaves a message of resistance into the fabric of his novel about urban change.

La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea (review)

Reviewed by: La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea Tatjana Pavlovic Keywords Tatjana Pavlovic, Ana Luengo, La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea, 1990s Spain, Memory, Spanish Civil War, Antonio Muñoz Molina, El jinete polaco, Félix de Azúa, Cambio de bandera, Rosa Montero, La hija del Caníbal, Dulce Chacón, Cielos de barro, Rafael Chirbes, La caída de Madrid, Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, lieux de mémoire Luengo, Ana. La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea. Berlin: Tranvía-Verlag Walter Frey, 2004. 287 pp. Centering on the invention and transmission of the politics of memory in 1990s Spain, Ana Luengo’s La encrucijada de la memoria analyzes six contemporary novels that explore the theme of the Spanish Civil War: Antonio Muñoz Molina’s El jinete polaco (1990), Félix de Azúa’s Cambio de bandera (1991), Rosa Montero’s La hija del Caníbal (1998), Dulce Chacón’s Cielos de barro (2000), Rafael Chirbes’s La caída de Madrid (2000), and Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina (2001). The book is divided in two parts. The first part consists of three chapters (“Teorías y dimensiones de la memoria,” “Apropiación de la memoria colectiva en la novela,” and “La memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española”) that outline the author’s theoretical approach. The second part dedicates each of its six chapters to analysis of the novels. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire—the dependence of memory on concrete sites—Luengo regards these novels as “memory places” and their authors as bearers of collective memory, responsible for the transmission of historical knowledge (homo agens). Luengo demonstrates various means by which these novels appropriate the collective dimension of memory in order to reconstruct the fictionalized past of the Spanish Civil War. Her reading highlights the interface between individual memory and socially constructed, internalized collective memory. The novels are also analyzed within the context of the heightened scholarly attention to collective memory in literary, media, and cultural forms of 1990s Spain. The strength of Luengo’s book lies in her original choice of authors from diverse literary and political backgrounds, ranging from the leftist thinkers of the 1960s to journalists and philosophers of the post-Franco transition period, all of whom have achieved market success with their writings on the Spanish Civil War. Luengo further outlines five criteria used for selecting the six novels included in the study. (1) All the authors were born after the Spanish Civil War, from Azúa, born in 1944, to Cercas, in 1962. This choice emphasizes the transmission of collective memory rather than subjective memory, (auto)biographies, testimonial novel, or memoirs. (2) The novels are representative of a wide variety of geographical settings, some of which foreground the experience of exile: El jinete polaco in Andalusia; Cambio de bandera in the Basque country; La hija del Caníbal in Barcelona, Madrid, and Latin America; Cielos de barro in Extremadura; La caída de Madrid in Madrid; and Soldados de Salamina in northern Catalonia and France. (3) The works exemplify different genres: “Bildungsroman, novelas de memoria, policíacas, de supuesta investigación periodística” (103). (4) The characters have diverse ideological tendencies [End Page 280] on a diagetic level; they include anarchists, communists, Falangists, monarchists, and Basque nationalists. (5) All the novels are bestsellers, highly acclaimed by readers and the publishing industry, and they have been re-edited in Spain and translated into various other languages. Another merit of La encrucijada de la memoria is the author’s expert analysis of the historical and political contexts of the novels. Luengo shows that, while the previous generation of writers (in the Franco period) had often turned to the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression as a novelistic subject, the more recent engagement with Spanish history is a phenomenon stemming from the pacto de olvido forged during the Transition of the mid-1970s. Contemporary novels...

Sifting through the Ashes. An Interview with Rafael Chirbes

Sifting through the Ashes. An Interview with Rafael Chirbes