Bulletin of Spanish Studies Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America
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Reviews of Books
Josep Antoni Clúa Serena, Juan Francisco Maura, John Beusterien, Felipe E. Ruán, Simon Breden, Esther Fernández, Leslie J. Harkema, C. A. Longhurst, Michael Seidman, Danny Evans, Chris Grocott, David Laraway, Palmira Fontes da Costa, David Tavárez, Eduardo Cabrera, Stephen Henighan & Ronald Briggs
To cite this article: Josep Antoni Clúa Serena, Juan Francisco Maura, John Beusterien, Felipe E. Ruán, Simon Breden, Esther Fernández, Leslie J. Harkema, C. A. Longhurst, Michael Seidman, Danny Evans, Chris Grocott, David Laraway, Palmira Fontes da Costa, David Tavárez, Eduardo Cabrera, Stephen Henighan & Ronald Briggs (2019) Reviews of Books, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 96:10, 1707-1730, DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2019.1723972 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2019.1723972
Published online: 26 Feb 2020.
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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cbhs20 Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCVI, Number 10, 2019
Reviews of Books
OVIDI, Heroides. Traducció de Guillem Nicolau, edició crítica de Josep Pujol i Gómez. Barcelona: Barcino. 2018. 577 pp.
En los últimos años, gracias a una intensa y prolífica labor de edición e investigación, se ha arrojado luz sobre la influencia clásica en los autores medievales hispanos, de modo que va delineándose un corpus amplio de traducciones (con su respectiva edición) de procedencias y estilos diversos, pero especialmente de Ovidio, uno de los autores clásicos más conocidos, leídos y citados en el Medievo. También los trabajos (precedidos de Congresos en la UNED- Madrid), dirigidos por el profesor Juan Antonio López Férez, han coadyuvado a esta simbiosis entre filólogos clásicos y filólogos de las literaturas castellana o catalana y han visto la luz muchos trabajos de tradición clásica y de recepción literaria. También, aunque en menor medida y en lengua alemana, son de reseñar los trabajos de Wilken Engelbrecht, desde 1993. En esta misma linea, el libro que reseñamos, de hermosa factura y editado por la prestigiosa editorial Barcino, ofrece una edición crítica de la traducción al catalán de las Heroidas de Ovidio realizada por el capellán real Guillem Nicolau para el rey Juan I de Aragón y su esposa Yolanda de Bar en 1389–1390. Incluye también la edición de las glosas perdidas que Nicolau adjuntó a su texto, y que se han conservado gracias a una traducción al castellano del texto y glosas originales catalanas. La traducción de Nicolau es situada en su contexto histórico, y se examina su conexión con los manuscritos glosados en latín y la tradición de los comentarios, especialmente el Bursarii de Guillermo de Orléans. Las notas críticas al texto y las glosas apuntan a la reconstrucción del texto latino original en el que Nicolau basó su traducción y arrojó luz sobre sus métodos. La edición, realizada en lengua catalana, consta de las siguientes partes: I. Una larga Introducción (1–191), ‘Vida i obres d’un traductor, origen i vida d’una traducció’; II. ‘El corpus de les Heroides i la traducció de Guillem Nicolau’; III. ‘Les Heroides en la tradició escolar llatina’; IV. ‘Les Heroides catalanes en el marc de les traduccions romàniques (segles XIII–XV)’;V.‘La traducció de Nicolau i la tradició llatina: per a la filiació del text’; VI. ‘Les introduccions i les glosses de Guillem Nicolau: caràcter i fonts’; VII. ‘Del llatí al català: la traducció a la llum de les glosses llatines’; VIII. ‘Edició’ (1. Manuscrits de la versió catalana de Guillem Nicolau; 2. El manuscrit de la versió castellana; 3. Filiació i relació entre els testimonis); y la edición de las Heroides (191–528), con dos apartados dedicados a un ‘Apèndix’ y a las siempre bienvenidas ‘Sigles’. Finalmente, una extensa y copiosa Bibliografía (ediciones de referencia, estudios y ediciones), con un Glosario final e índice de nombres. Las Heroidas eran un texto de uso en la escuela gramatical medieval, y los manuscritos conservados reflejan este carácter, con la adición de materiales complementarios en forma de glosas e introducciones a cada epístola, que resumen la historia mítica en que se inserta. Y aunque haya glosas, no por ello suelen faltar las introducciones. La traducción catalana de Nicolau responde exactamente a la transmisión escolar medieval del texto ovidiano. En el manuscrito que la conserva completa, y en el manuscrito también único de su versión castellana, la traducción comprende las epístolas 1–14 y 16–21, con algunas lagunas, y con la presencia de dísticos apócrifos iniciales e interpolados en el texto. El autor de la edición, Josep Pujol, es catedrático de literatura medieval de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, concentrado en las traducciones de Nicolau, ‘Tirant lo Blanc’, las
ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/19/10/001707-24 © 2020 Bulletin of Spanish Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2019.1723972 1708 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS fuentes clásicas e italianes, y las traducciones y de la recepción de autores clásicos. Centrándonos de nuevo en la traducción ovidiana que nos ocupa, y en su autor, señalemos, como indicábamos supra, que fue realizada por Guillem Nicolau, capellán de la corte de Pere III el Cerimoniós (1336–1387) y Juan I el Cazador (1387–1396) de Cataluña y Aragón, autor también de las del Chronicon Siculum o Chronicon Siciliae al catalán y de la Crónica de los Reyes de Aragón y los condes de Barcelona al latín. De Nicolau sabemos que en enero de 1381 todavía trabajaba en la traducción de las Crónicas de Aragón y de Sicilia. Fue ayudante de escrivania de la cancelleria y había sido capellán y comensal de la reina Elionor, tercera mujer de Pere III. El 30 de julio de 1366 entró como ayudante de registro en la corte de la reina. En 1375 redactó los epitafios de los reyes Jaume II y Alfons III el Benigne. Estudiante de derecho canónico, el rey los recomendó al Papa en 1373 para la obtención del beneficio de la Iglesia de Maella (la Terra Alta, pero diócesis de Zaragoza), y en 1375, todavía siendo estudiante, fue recomendado de nuevo para obtener el beneficio de la Iglesia de Tiana, en el Maresme. Por lo que respecta a la traducción catalana medieval de Guillem Nicolau y si nos retrotraemos un poco en el tiempo, cabe afirmar que en 1927 la Fundació Bernat Metge ya editó y tradujo al catalán las Heroides de Publi Ovidio Nasón. La edición y traducción del clásico latino estuvo a cargo de Adela María Trepat y Anna Maria de Saavedra. Y esta traducción catalana, sin embargo, no era lógicamente la primera, ya que siglos antes, como decimos, Nicolau ya había traducido por iniciativa propia esta obra, que sería muy valorada por la familia de Juan I de Aragón. Las casi doscientas páginas que preceden, en forma de ‘Introducción’ (con sus ciento setenta notas), a la edición del texto (en más de trescientas páginas, sin contar los apéndices) con sus correspondientes y copiosas notas explicativas (y glosas) a pie de página, hacen muy agradable y útil la lectura. Especial atención nos han merecido el estudio de las glosas, tanto en la Introducción, como en su enumeración durante el proceso de edición de la obra. Una edición, en definitiva, que servirá como obra de referencia digna, con la seriedad y akríbeia que se requiere y se presupone en estos casos, y que facilitará una consulta ágil, amena y sin elucubraciones innecesarias ni en el aspecto lingüístico, ni el literario.
JOSEP ANTONI CLÚA SERENA Universidad de Lleida.
Memorial de ida y venida hasta Maka: la peregrinación de cOmar Paţōn. Estudio, edición y glosario de Pablo Roza Candás. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo. 2018. 482 pp; 18 pp. de láminas.
Omar Paton, musulmán castellano del siglo XV, emprendió desde Ávila un largo viaje hasta Tierra Santa, dejándonos su Memorial, que ha sido olvidado hasta el presente. Hoy constituye un testimonio excepcional del islam español tardío. El presente libro es el resultado de las investigaciones de Pablo Roza Candás, especializado en el mundo aljamiado morisco en particular y semítico en general de la Edad Media y el Renacimiento. En el caso que nos ocupa, trata la narración autobiográfica de un peregrino que decide cumplir el precepto islámico de peregrinar a la Meca una vez en la vida. Esta peregrinación, o hagg,constituyelamáximaexpresiónde solidaridad entre los creyentes de la comunidad musulmana castellana de finales del XV. El profesor Roza Candás analiza la obra en una magnífica edición dividida en tres grandes secciones. En la primera sección se incluyen los antecedentes de estas peregrinaciones realizadas a la Meca por mudéjares y moriscos y sus predecesores andalusíes. Igualmente, Roza Candás analiza la obra de Omar Paton y las diferencias de autoría y datación entre los REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1709 diferentes manuscritos existentes de su obra (el del Fondo Documental de las Cortes de Aragón y el de las Escuelas Pías de Zaragoza). En esta sección, Roza Candás ofrece un estudio del contenido de la obra y su contextualización histórica, con apéndice documental incluido, así como una caracterización lingüística de los manuscritos, en sus niveles fonológico, morfológico, sintáctico y léxico. La segunda sección está dedicada a la edición del texto, facilitando la lectura del mismo a los profanos, pero siendo fiel a las características gráficas del mismo. La tercera sección es un estudio del vocabulario de ambos manuscritos e incluye un glosario de voces comunes, un inventario exhaustivo de topónimos y antropónimos, y la bibliografía utilizada, donde se incluyen estudios árabes que van desde las aljamas mudéjares de Castilla hasta los remotos desiertos de Oriente. Como indica el autor, paradójicamente, para los musulmanes andalusíes la salida a Oriente no siempre favorecía a las instancias del poder islámico y, aunque nunca fue prohibido por los omeyas, almorávides o almohades, sí se presentaban alternativas piadosas como el gihad contra los reinos cristianos, que de alguna manera sustituían el fervor religioso y resultaban, desde el aspecto geopolítico, más práctico. Dentro de los textos aljamiados que contienen narraciones a Oriente de la época mudéjar y morisca, el del mudéjar abulense Omar Paton, compuesto en año 1491 a su regreso a Castilla, debe colocarse a la cabeza. Interesa observar, que pese a que el protagonista y autor de este viaje es un musulmán, en su viaje a Oriente toma conciencia de su singularidad hispánica por no hablar bien la lengua árabe. Incluso en algún momento es apresado al resultar sospechoso de ‘cristiano’ por no dominar la lengua del ‘Corán’. Sin embargo, Calanda fue uno de los principales centros de adoctrinamiento en Aragón para los moriscos y está atestiguado, bien a través de los procesos inquisitoriales, que estos poseían libros escritos en árabe. Se da el caso, igualmente, que algunas mujeres, como Blanca Ezquerro, ‘enseñaba el Corán y ceremonias de moros’ (124). El relato de Omar Paton se puede clasificaramediocaminoentrelarihla, género clásico musulmán de la literatura de viajes por etapas, y la literatura de viajes cristianos (reales o fantásticos), de carácter narrativo y expositivo. No obstante, como agudamente indica Roza Candás, llama la atención que Omar Paton omita información de lugares donde pasó gran cantidad de tiempo como Túnez, de la que solo dice: ‘La más gentil ciudad que haya en Berbería’ (186), o que, en sus dos visitas al Cairo no mencione las pirámides. Estas omisiones, tan obvias, nos recuerdan a las de otras narraciones autobiográficas de cronistas cristianos que pasaron a América, como en el caso de Cabeza de Vaca a la Florida, que menciona a toda la fauna del lugar sin incluir el alligator. El autor de este estudio, Roza Candás, es consciente de este paralelismo entre literaturas musulmanas y cristianas contemporáneas: ‘Este recurso literario de la “maravilla” lo encontramos abundantemente tanto en la literatura de mirabilia cristiana medieval como en las obras de rihla, elementos que el género árabe toma de la literatura de aga ib.Enestepunto Paton parece acercarse más a la admiración contenida ante lo real y cotidiano de los peregrinos cristianos de la época que a las descripciones de lo asombroso e irreal de los autores islámicos’ (192). Contar con especialistas de la talla de Pablo Roza Candás es una garantía para el futuro y buen hacer de los estudios de la literatura española aljamiada. Es de agradecer que algunas instituciones como la Universidad de Oviedo apoyen este tipo de publicaciones que tanto engrandecen el acerbo cultural de la literatura hispánica. Este trabajo es el mejor ejemplo de lo que deberían ser los estudios y las ediciones de todo el material realizado en lenguas semíticas a lo largo de la Península Ibérica.
JUAN FRANCISCO MAURA University of Vermont. 1710 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS
STEVEN WAGSCHAL, Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds: A Cognitive Historical Analysis. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press. 2018. x + 343 pp; 29 illustrations.
Human and many animal minds are inherently embodied. In Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain that animal and human reason are tied to a discrete body and a brain that interact with the environment which provides a basis for a sense of the real. Ever since Lakoff and Johnson developed the theory of cognitive embodiment, scholars in the field of early modern Spanish literature began to underscore the importance of cognitive science. Cervantes specialist Howard Mancing notes that it is dangerous to ignore the embodied mind as described in the physical, biological, social and human sciences. Following his lead, publications such as Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2015) by Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon have shown the importance of literature in illuminating the complexity of the embodied mind. Following the trajectory of cognitive studies in early modern Spanish literary studies, Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds: A Cognitive Historical Analysis by Steven Wagschal is the first systematic study that scrutinizes the embodied animal mind. Many scholars, such as cognitive ethologists, devote research careers to when and how animals think and Minding Animals looks to these in its description of how Spanish authors constructed animals’ cognitive faculties centuries ago. For Wagschal, the critical approach that includes cognitive models of animals from science is extremely productive for advancing animal studies and welfare because it builds a vocabulary and guide for constructive anthropomorphism. Chapter 1 studies the Spanish medieval period by focusing on Castilian bestiaries, early editions of Aesop’s fables, and the Cantigas de Santa María by Alfonso X, the Wise (1221– 1284). Chapter 2 explores hunting manuals, such as the Libro de la montería (1582), by Gonzalo Argote de Molina (1548–1596) and El arte de la ballestería y la montería (1644), by Alonso Martínez Espinar (1588–1682). Chapter 2 also explores husbandry texts such as Agricultura general (1513), by Alonso de Herrera (1470–1539) and Secretos de la casa de campo (1617 in Catalan and 1625 in Spanish) by Miguel de Agustí (c.1560–1630). Chapter 3 looks to Spanish narratives about the New World with special focus on José de Acosta (c.1540–1600), Tómas López Medel (1520–1582), Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1577) and Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590). Chapter 4 examines the work of Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), most especially Don Quixote (Part I: 1605 and Part II: 1615), but also ‘El coloquio de los perros’ (1613) and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617). The book contains a bibliography, index, footnotes and twenty-nine illustrations. The cover includes a striking image of a manatee, a detail from the 1651 edition Rerum medicarum Novae Hispanae thesaurus by Francisco Hernández (1514–1587). Unfortunately, the editors have neglected to include a list of illustrations at the beginning of the book. None the less, they have made an excellent choice of illustrations, most especially three images from the Cantigas de Santa María, including a detail from Cantiga 29 showing a line of prostrating animals—a beautifully depicted zebra, giraffe, lion and, elephant. Also of note are three images from the Florentine Codex, including a dog, ahuitzotl (otter?) and quetzalhuitzili (hummingbird). I was quite pleased by the rich variety of animals that populate the book’s pages, which include domestics like bulls, chickens, cows, donkeys, goats and horses. Birds appear too, such as cranes, doves, ducks, falcons, goldfinches, herons, parrots and storks. The list of animals contains those from the land—bats, beavers, camels, chimpanzees and rabbits—and the sea—crocodiles, eels, sea lions, sucker sharks and whales. Wagschal’s comments on New World animal descriptions are refreshing. Sahagún gratuitously anthropomorphizes the REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1711 coyote and jaguar; Medel is primarily interested in the anthropocentric use-value of the manatee; and Oviedo is exceedingly nervous about enjoying the taste of iguanas even though they are so ugly. The arguments about New World animals are also some of the most perplexing. In his discussion of texts about the Americas, Wagschal describes a supposed universal truth about embodied animal cognition based on its habitational parameter. In other words, the environmental context in which an animal lives determines the way in which an author conceives the animal’s mind. Wagschal is not interested in historical contingency. He asserts that Sahagún describes Nahua cosmology. However, I would have liked to have seen more detail about the meaning of the animals from other indigenous sources. Wagschal also calls the texts about the New World ‘natural historical works guided by curiosity’ (246). I would have preferred a more rigorous tackling of this question of curiosity. What about the embodied cognitive process that stimulates curiosity about one animal over another? Occasionally, the author’s prose slips into vague, clumsy constructions such as the passive formulation concerning how Sahagún describes the tendency ‘to not eat one’s friends’ in reference to dogs (181). The book, though, is beautifully written in lucid, succinct prose. Its specific arguments will stimulate new paths for research, such as the rise of a sixteenth-century angst that stimulates classificatory methods that break away from classical zoology. Another argument that will lead to further research is the massification of domestic animals as property, as part of a belief in their supposed lack of embodied cognition. Minding Animals is a welcome addition to the growing body of studies about animals in Hispanism. It shows how early Spanish literature advocates the mindedness of animals and teaches nuanced meanings of anthropomorphism as a productive way to understand animals. Constructive anthropomorphism occurs when one knows about species-specific behaviour that enables appropriate inferences about animal feeling. Animals do not have human minds nor do they need gratuitous compassion. They are, however, individuals with discrete minds and deserve—in the words that Wagschal uses to describe Cervantes’ attitude —‘our consideration, reflection, and empathy’ (185).
JOHN BEUSTERIEN Texas Tech University.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Información de Argel. Edición, con introducción, de Adrián J. Sáez. Madrid: Cátedra. 2019. 264 pp.
Adrián Sáez’s modern edition of the legal-bureaucratic document that records Cervantes’ five- year captivity in Ottoman-protected Algiers is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on the Islamic and Islamized other, both in the works of Cervantes and in the wider early modern period. The critical edition Sáez has prepared for Cátedra comes about five years after Pina Rosa Piras’ ‘La información en Argel’ de Miguel de Cervantes: entre ficción y documento (Alcalá de Henares: Univ. de Alcalá, 2014) and is a considerable improvement. Sáez is to be commended for drawing an important distinction between the Información as a legal-bureaucratic document and the more clearly fictional depictions of captivity in Cervantes’ literary works (54). Despite our desire for a kind of wall-to-wall fiction, the Información fits uncomfortably in the fiction category, for the simple fact that it is not a straightforward fictional account. Rather, it is a notarial record produced in a legal- bureaucratic setting with the participation of the notary Pedro de Ribera, who probably accompanied Fray Juan Gil, the friar who ransomed Cervantes in Algiers in 1580. By the 1712 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS time Cervantes was rescued, ransoming had become highly bureaucratized and in preparing the Información Cervantes was engaging first hand with the monarchy’s administrative apparatus in North Africa. The Información, then, brings the reader face to face with the interplay of the factual and the fictional, as the reader is forced to ponder the relationship of this ‘factual’ notarial record and fictionalized captivity in Cervantes’ literature. Sáez’s solution is to separate one and the other, by contextualizing the Información as the ‘factual’ written form that it is (53–67), and then moving to representations of captivity in Cervantes’ fictional works (68–89). Of course, a trouble-free segregation of fact and fiction is not always possible, but then again that is precisely what Cervantes problematizes in his magnum opus, Don Quixote. Yet, understanding the Información would benefit from exploring further issues, such as how people told factual stories, what they thought a good story was and how they moulded their stories according to the listener or interlocutor. These concerns were certainly on Cervantes’ mind as he drafted the Información in collaboration with the notary Pedro de Ribera. Sáez navigates well the fact/fiction interplay in the Introduction to the edition. He gets into the nitty-gritty of the document’s crafting, the reasons behind it, and how critics have engaged with the Información (36–53). This section will be especially useful to those new to the Información as well as to more seasoned readers. Especially relevant are the pages where Sáez offers the five main reasons why Cervantes prepares the document (39–40). Sáez also does a good job at organizing, chronicling and contextualizing Cervantes’ four escape attempts (26–28), and he offers historical context prior to and about Cervantes’ captivity and ransom, including a handy timeline (35). The self-fashioning tenor of the Información is achieved in its crafting. Sáez underscores the mediating role of the notary, observing in particular that this filtering ‘difumina en un cierto porcentaje la paternidad cervantina’ (89–90). Although Sáez does say that the Información ‘es un texto polifónico y de naturaleza oral’ (37), it is worth mentioning that the notary not only gave ‘other people an official “voice”. He knew the state-sanctioned forms through which agency could be constituted in writing’ (Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru [Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2010], 2–3). The Información is a text of composite agency, involving Cervantes, the notary Ribera, the twelve witnesses, fray Juan Gil, as well as King Philip II (the implied interlocutor) whose authority gave meaning and credibility to the document. As a written record produced with the intervention of a notary and his fides publica, the Información is linked to the repositories where such records are housed, state archives. Cervantes’ Información is stored at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville (
FELIPE E. RUÁN Brock University, Ontario.
LOPE DE VEGA, Comedias, Parte XVII. ProLope edición crítica, coordinada por Daniele Crivellari y Eugenio Maggi. Barcelona: Gredos. 2018. 2 vols: I, viii + 1158 pp.; II, viii + 1036 pp.
The ProLope research group’s mammoth task of publishing critical editions of Lope de Vega’s notoriously vast oeuvre of dramatic works continues with twelve plays edited in two volumes representing the Decimaséptima parte first published in 1621: Con su pan se lo coma (1612–1615), Quien más no puede (1616), El soldado amante (1593–1595), Muertos vivos (1599–1602), El primer rey de Castilla (1598–1603), El dómine Lucas (1598–1603), Lucinda perseguida (1599–1602), El ruiseñor de Sevilla (1603–1606), El sol parado (1592?), La madre de la mejor (1610–1615), Jorge Toledano (1595–1597) and El hidalgo Bencerraje (1599–1608). The overall coordinator of this project is Gonzalo Pontón, while the editors of this particular volume are Daniele Crivellari and Eugenio Maggi, who provide an Introduction on the editorial history of the Parte XVII. The Introduction begins with a note on the approximate dating of the plays (indicated above), noting that these follow the chronology of S. Griswold Morley and Courtney Bruerton, but amending where more recent research on publication or production history of the play allows. The editors also suggest a thematic unity in the plays that Lope included in the seventeenth part of his works, pointing out that they may be grouped under the categories of ‘el palatino y el historial’ (7). Thus, the conflicts of Quien más no puede, El soldado amante, Muertos vivos and Lucinda perseguida take place at court, while El primer rey de Castilla, El sol parado, El hidalgo Bencerraje and Jorge Toledano all explore historical subjects, albeit in some cases leaning heavily towards the novelesco. Three plays do not fit this classification and seem to represent Lope’s taste for hybridity of genre and content: El dómine Lucas and El ruiseñor de Sevilla are both urban comedies, while La madre de la mejor is the only out-and-out religious play of the collection. Overall, Moorish motifs and medieval Spain seem to dominate the plays Lope compiled for this volume. The editors also indicate that, luckily for them, only two editions of the Parte XVII were published, greatly simplifying the editorial task: the editors include a full list of typos in the princeps, and each play comes with a comprehensive aparato crítico collating the different editions. Each individual play has its own editor, responsible for a brief Introduction on each play and the critical edition of the text itself. Con su pan se lo coma is edited by Daniele Crivellari; Quien más no puede by Marco Presotto; El soldado amante by Gonzalo Pontón; Muertos vivos by Luciana Gentilli and Tiziana Pucciarelli; El primer rey de castilla by Adrián 1714 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS
J. Sáez; El dómine Lucas El dómine Lucas by Miguel M. García-Bermejo Giner; Lucinda Perseguida by Esther Borrego Gutiérrez; El ruiseñor de Sevilla by Eugenio Maggi; El sol parado by Fernando Plata; La madre de lo mejor by Elvezio Canonica; Jorge Toledano by Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán; and El hidalgo Bencerraje by Ilaria Resta. It would be impossible in these brief lines to evaluate or introduce the plays themselves: this task is best left to the editors, who review the text, offering information on publication history where possible, textual problems and differences, and plot and verse synopses. None of these titles form part of the canon of Lope’s more recognizable works and, in most cases as the editors themselves hasten to point out, they have little to no recent publication history and absolutely no recent production history to speak of. Although the plays may not be familiar, the style, voice and Golden-Age tropes are. These two beautifully bound and comprehensively researched tomes offer a fascinating glimpse into a little-known Lope de Vega, making these texts available once more to both academics and theatre practitioners alike.
SIMON BREDEN University of Nottingham.
LOPE DE VEGA, A Wild Night in Toledo. Translated by Marta Albalá Pelegrín et al., with an Introduction by Paul Cella and Adrián Collado. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta. 2018. 155 pp.
Tuve la gran suerte de estar en contacto con Babara Fuchs cuando iniciaba su proyecto de ‘Diversifying the Classics’ en UCLA. La misión de la profesora Fuchs con esta iniciativa fue, desde un principio, la de diseminar la comedia y abrir nuevas vías para dar a conocer el patrimonio teatral peninsular a los estudiantes y profesionales del teatro en el mundo anglo- americano. Es decir, hacer más accesible una riquísima tradición teatral, para muchos todavía inexplorada, que iba más allá del teatro isabelino y de su principal representante, Shakespeare. Dentro del mundo anglosajón y de los profesionales de la escena, la comedia tiende a reducirse a los nombres de Lope, Tirso y Calderón y a sus obras más icónicas. Parte del problema de que el teatro peninsular barroco se quede anquilosado en los mismos autores y textos es una falta de traducciones al inglés que permitan ofrecer una visión panorámica que haga justicia a la riqueza de este repertorio. Con esta misión se fundó el UCLA Working Group on the Comedia in Translation and Performance perteneciente, a su vez, al proyecto más amplio de ‘Diversifying the Classics’. A Wild Night in Toledo es un perfecto ejemplo de la misión que propone este grupo. No se trata de una edición exhaustiva a nivel crítico o filológico de la obra, al contrario, es una edición sumamente práctica, en la que las primeras páginas de contexto dan una visión general del género de la comedia, de la significación del teatro en la época y de Lope de Vega. La introducción a cargo de Paul Cella y Adrián Collado está también dirigida a ofrecer una mejor comprensión de la trama y de algunos aspectos que contribuyen a que esta obra sea única y atractiva para la escena contemporánea. Cella y Collado hacen un eficaz resumen de las diferentes tramas que se entremezclan a lo largo de la obra, explican como el texto dialoga con el contexto histórico de la época en ‘Towards a People’s History of Early Modern Spain’ yen‘Women, Disguise, and Identity’ analizan del protagonismo de la mujer no solo en esta obra sino en el teatro del Siglo de Oro en general. De hecho, está focalización que el teatro del Siglo de Oro tiene en las heroínas femeninas le convierte en una fuente única para jóvenes actrices con roles de gran visibilidad en comparación con el teatro isabelino. En menos de catorce páginas un lector no experto en la comedia puede hacerse una idea de lo que esta obra tiene que ofrecer y de sus elementos únicos e innovadores. REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1715
Al igual que la Introducción, la traducción está también pensada con fines pragmáticos aunque no por esto deja de ser rigurosa. Los traductores se han basado en la edición de Juan Eugenio Hartzenbush de 1852, basada a su vez en una copia de La noche toledana de 1612 y en la edición de Ignacio Sánchez Aguilar (Comedias de Lope de Vega, ed. Luigi Giuliani, 3 vols [Lérida: Milenio/Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona, 2002], III). No se ha mantenido la versificación. La obra se ha traducido en prosa para conseguir una mayor claridad y una mejor adaptación a la escena dentro de un contexto anglo-americano. El texto fluye de manera rápida y natural y los traductores consiguen que no se pierda la esencia original de una obra que, aunque está muy arraigada a un contexto español, tiene también una esencia universal. La traducción sabe guardar un perfecto equlibrio entre estos dos polos. Las notas a pie de página son explicativas sin entrar en explicaciones detalladas y su misión es la de facilitar la comprensión de la manera más eficaz posible. Traducciones y ediciones como estas son el futuro para introducir la comedia en los escenarios internacionales y en muchos de los departmentos de teatro o en clases de literatura que dialogan con temáticas relacionadas con la temprana modernidad. A Wild Night in Toledo no pretende ser una edición crítica o exhaustiva de la obra ni tampoco una traducción purista del texto de Lope sino una traducción rigurosa con la misión de dar a conocer los actractivos únicos de la comedia. Confío que este título será uno más entre una larga lista que seguirá creciendo en los próximos años gracias a la serie UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies recientemente inaugurada por Juan de la Cuesta. El UCLA Working Group on the Comedia in Translation and Performance es un proyecto visionario que, gracias a traducciones como esta, puede hacer despegar de manera definitiva la comedia hacia rumbos internacionales y crear una tradición en su estudio y su puesta en escena en los departamentos de teatro y en los escenarios anglo-americanos.
ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ Rice University, Texas.
BENITO JERÓNIMO FEIJOO, JOSEFA AMAR Y BORBÓN & INÉS JOYES Y BLAKE, In Defence of Women. Edited and translated by Joanna M. Barker. Cambridge: The Modern Humanities Research Association. 2018. 168 pp.
The debate over the role of women in eighteenth-century Spanish society has been studied extensively over the last several decades. Scholars such as Mónica Bolufer Peruga, Elizabeth Franklin Lewis, Catherine Jaffe, Victoria López-Cordón Cortezo and Theresa Ann Smith have contributed to what is now a substantial critical corpus on this topic in Hispanic letters. With her recent volume In Defence of Women, editor and translator Joanna M. Barker does a great service to multiple fields beyond (and including) Hispanic studies by bringing some of the central voices in this debate together in a single, English-language edition. The book comprises a new translation of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo’s Defensa de las mujeres (Defence of Women), as well as the first ever English translations of key texts by Josefa Amar y Borbón and Inés Joyes y Blake. The four texts collected in this volume were published between 1726 and 1798. Feijoo’swell- known Defensa appeared in the first volume of his Teatro crítico universal (1726–1739), and was translated multiple times during the author’s lifetime and into the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, as Barker explains in her Introduction to this text (27), hers is the first English translation to appear since 1811. The Benedictine monk’sinfluential defence of women and their abilities served as an important precedent for Amar y Borbón in 1786, when she wrote her Discurso en defensa de los talentos de las mujeres, y de su aptitud para el gobierno, y otros cargos en que se emplean los hombres (translated by Barker as Discourse in Defence of the 1716 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS
Talents of Women, and their Aptitude for Government and Other Positions in which Men are Employed). Composed in the context of a debate regarding the admission of female members to Madrid’s Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, this essay built on Feijoo’s reflections in order to argue that women had the ability and the right to participate fully in the intellectual life of the Economic Society. Amar y Borbón especially stressed the value of women’s education, which became the focus of her later work, Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres (Discourse on the Physical and Moral Education of Women, 1790). A translation of the prologue to this book follows the 1786 text in Barker’s collection. The fourth and final document featured in the volume is Barker’s English rendering of Joyes y Blake’s Apología de las mujeres (Apology for Women) (1798), a text the author appended to her own translation of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. In her critical commentary, Barker pays significant attention to the work of both Joyes y Blake and Amar y Borbón as translators. The four translated texts are accompanied by an extensive critical apparatus, comprising a general Introduction, detailed introductions to each text, thorough footnotes, a bibliography, and an index. These parts of the book will be very useful to readers unfamiliar with the Spanish context or the time period, as they provide vital information about the society in which Feijoo, Amar y Borbón, and Joyes y Blake wrote. In the general Introduction, Barker discusses the history of views on women in early modern Spain as well as the development of the eighteenth-century debate. She also considers Spain’s relationship with the rest of Europe during the period. Some aspects of this historical and cultural background could be discussed at greater length in this Introduction, particularly when they relate to issues and events that come up later on in the volume. Such topics include the orientalist gaze that conditioned European nations’ view of Spain as well as Spaniards’ understanding of Muslim cultures (discussed on pp. 7 & 94, and in notes 30, 99 & 143), and the role of Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers’ article on Spain in the Encyclopédie Méthodique (mentioned briefly on p. 83) in stoking Spaniards’ anxieties about their place within Europe. Another contextual element that is somewhat obscured in Barker’s otherwise rigorous commentary is regional specificity within the Iberian Peninsula. When presenting Amar y Borbón’s Discurso en defensa de los talentos de las mujeres, Barker includes substantial information about the Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País, yet she does not mention the Basque origin of these societies, nor call attention to the ambiguity of the term ‘País’ in their title (Barker translates the word as ‘Nation’). Finally, an apparent confusion leads Barker to locate the Real Instituto Jovellanos in Galicia and not Asturias (113). These oversights do not negate the value of this timely volume, which presents an important grouping of historical texts to the English reader in translations that are both accurate and accessible. With this edition, Barker provides a detailed account of an intellectual debate in eighteenth-century Spain that holds great relevance for contemporary scholarship in women’s studies, European history and literary studies, among other fields.
LESLIE J. HARKEMA Yale University, Connecticut.
Imagined Truths: Realism in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture. Edited by Mary L. Coffey and Margot Versteeg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2019. vi + 398 pp; 3 illustrations.
This hefty volume consists of thirteen essays by different contributors preceded by a substantial Introduction. In the latter the editors claim that Spanish realism is unique. While it participated fully in nineteenth-century European realism, it did so aware of its own tradition drawn from the REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1717
Golden Age. The central question is whether realism reflects reality or constructs it, since to confuse the process of representation with what is represented is obviously naive. Realists, we are told, were generally aware of the reconstruction element, but I think that, though the topic is mentioned, more might have been made of the mediating role of language, especially since in the first half of the nineteenth century thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt had already raised issues concerning the linguistic intrusion in the formation of national culture and ideas in general. Presumably literary realism is based on the assumption that language is capable, to an extent, of reproducing the reality which we experience.Modernism,influenced by such thinkers as well as by more radical ones such as Fritz Mauthner, was to deny such an assumption. Did no realist stop to think whether language might not simply reflect reality but actually distort it? We need to know more about this in order to achieve a fuller understanding of realism. The editors quote Juan Marsé’sopinionthat‘le premier devoir de tout romancier consiste à décrire la realité sans la falsifier’ (18). Perhaps so; but we have known at least since Immanuel Kant, if not since Francis Bacon and René Descartes, that truth can be predicated not of what exists but of what is thought. Things exist because we can think about them; if we could not think about them they would not exist for us. Have modern realists been aware of this, and if so how has it affected their art? We need to know more. The Introduction nevertheless covers several relevant points and provides an appropriate historical and semantic context for what is to follow, even if the odd passing assertion is debatable. Can one really say that Miguel de Unamuno and Pío Baroja ‘rejected Galdós outright’? Unamuno eventually reconsidered his earlier low esteem and Baroja had a thoroughly ambivalent attitude to his great predecessor, critical yet grudgingly admiring. He also returned to documentary realism in the late 1920s, much earlier than the 1940s which the editors see as the terminus ad quem for the non-realist or modernist interlude in between realisms. In this last regard the case of Ramón Sender’s early work might also have been revealing. The collection opens with ‘Arabella’s Veil: Translating Realism in Don Quijote con faldas’, which studies how the Spanish translator of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) tinkered with the text in his 1808 version in order to bring the romantic Arabella more visibly back to earth, that is, back from her extravagant imaginings derived from Madame Scudéry’s romances to a conventional female existence. This ‘re-naturalization’ of a quixotic enterprise is seen as pointing the way to a new realism which was to bear fruit later in the century. The second essay, ‘Between costumbrista Sketch and Short Story: Armando Palacio Valdés’ Aguas fuertes’, is an informative canter through costumbrismo at the height of the realist vogue in the 1870s and 1880s. No thesis here, but plenty of shrewd appraisals of this typically Spanish genre that tells us so much of ordinary existence. To go beyond costumbrismo and show that the work under scrutiny ‘strongly evidences elements of realist discourse’ (81) is the aim of the third essay, ‘Money, Capital, Monstrosity: Metaphorical Matrices of Realism in Antonio Flores’s Ayer, hoy y mañana’, an aim amply fulfilled if we accept the view that realism sought to capture the good and the evil beneath the mores (Galdós’ definition). ‘The Physician in the Narratives of Galdós and Clarín’ is the fourth contribution, a comparison of medical men, their science and their art, in Gloria and La Regenta.Itfinds that these works display serious reservations about medicine’s ability to deal with the underlying causes of malady, especially in the case of women. The fifth essay, ‘Travelling by Street Car through Madrid with Galdós and Pardo Bazán’, looks at two tramway stories to show how ‘both authors ground their fictions firmly in the sociological reality of Madrid’ (163), at a time when industrialization was tending to split society into the affluent and the destitute. Madrid is also the focus of the next essay, ‘Urban Hyperrealism: Galdós’s Dickensian Descriptions of Madrid’, but this time on the way Galdós cleverly uses Dickensian techniques to describe the slums of Madrid. The study of stylistic techniques and their effects based on generalization, incompleteness, and the puzzled perception of the chaos of the urban environment (‘an experiential view’ [189], as the author pithily calls it) 1718 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS proves to be a fruitful approach. Still on urban (un)reality, the rather complex essay that follows, ‘Observed versus Imaginative Communities: Creative Realism in Galdós Misericordia’, studies the writer’s ‘creative realism’ by relating Madrid’s urban setting and inhabitants to a re-imagined reality within the plot (Benina’s ingenious invention). In the eighth contribution, ‘Colonialism, Collages, and Thick Description: Pardo Bazán and the Rhetoric of Detail’, ‘thick description’ is the term given to the detailed and sustained description of material objects with a semiotic intent, and is employed to cast light on Pardo Bazán’s ‘rhetoric of detail to evoke a sense of presence and of knowledge’ (219), in this case the economic, social, and cultural impact of the loss of the Philippines. The essay that follows, ‘Embodied Minds: Critical Erotic Decisions in La Regenta’, is a sharply focused and revealing study of physical reactions on the part of key characters in Clarín’s novel, reactions based on the observation of real and basic physiological phenomena. The title of the tenth essay, ‘María Zambrano on Women, Realism, and Freedom’ is self-explanatory: in Zambrano’s view the realist novel is based on the possibility—or aspiration—of freedom, that is, freedom from an overbearing material and social reality as exemplified by Galdós’ Benina. Based on the assumption that Galdós must have been a ‘vehement and passionate correspondent’, the eleventh essay in the collection, ‘Writing (Un)clear Code: The Letters and Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Pérez Galdós’, offers a speculative filling-in of the gaps left by the loss of Don Benito’s letters to the condesa. Though certainly interesting in itself, the essay’s connection to Spanish realism is anything but clear, except just possibly that Galdós adapted the correspondence of his lover to his own fictional ends, but even this is partly supposition. Another kind of (real) adaptation is the subject of ‘“Volvía Galdós triunfante”: Fortunata y Jacinta on Stage’, which reviews and analyses contemporary critics’ reactions to the risky staging of Galdós’ masterpiece in 1930, which was perceived as only partly successful, but it does not seem that a loss of realism had much to do with the divided critical opinion. The final essay, ‘When Reality is too Harsh to Bear: Role-Play in Juan Marsé’s “Historia de detectives”’, studies the kind of realism which ‘refers to the representation of mental activity, including the workings of the imagination’ (344). Given this definition, one wonders whether there is anything left that is not realism, but the essay on Marsé does show some significant parallels between his story and nineteenth-century realism as exemplified by Galdós. I conclude by warning that my summaries over-simplify what are often quite sophisticated presentations. Each essay has something valuable to offer in its own way, even if they do not all engage equally with the central question of realism. Inevitably the notion of realism which emerges from the collection as a whole is broad and eclectic. The book is a stimulating re- assessment, as well as a timely counterbalance to the plethora of works on modernist writing of the past twenty years. Those interested in the Spanish nineteenth century and/or the novel and its theory will find much here with which to engage in productive debate.
C. A. LONGHURST University of Leeds.
JOAN MARIA THOMÀS, José Antonio Primo de Rivera: The Reality and Myth of a Spanish Fascist Leader. Translated from Spanish by John Bates. New York/Oxford: Berghahn. 2019. 367 pp.
Despite its ultimate failure and because of its ineffable atrocities, fascism continues to fascinate. Of the three major European fascisms, the Spanish variety was the most enduring, and its leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, attained mythological status during the long REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1719 dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Thomàs’ excellent biography critically examines José Antonio’s political trajectory and the Franco regime’s instrumentalization of his image. José Antonio (usually referred to by his first name, unlike other fascist leaders) was the oldest son of the dictator, General Miguel Primo de Rivera (r.1923–1930). Throughout his life, José Antonio devoted himself to defending and surpassing the achievements of his father. To that end, in 1933 he founded the Falange Española. His political ideology reflected both foreign and native influences. Among the former was the imperialism and ultra-nationalism of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy; among the latter were the Inquisitorial religion of the Catholic Monarchs, the regenerationism of Joaquín Costa and the elitist vitalism of José Ortega y Gasset. Like other fascisms but perhaps even more so given his reputation as a señorito, José Antonio’s variety appealed symbolically and programmatically to the working class, adopting supposedly proletarian styles and promising social revolution. The party drafted several anti-idleness planks in its various platforms and condemned those who its leader considered to be capitalist ‘parasites’ (171). The aristocracy, the wealthy, and intellectuals were to be usefully busy in the new collectivist and fascist ‘workers’ state’ (110), which would be organized as a ‘huge syndicate of producers’ (150). José Antonio especially admired Italian fascism and Il Duce himself whom the Spaniard implausibly claimed ‘to be the only person still at work’ during Roman nights (115). European fascists desired a peculiar kind of workerist cultural and social revolution in their respective nations. Despite or perhaps because of its workerism, the appeal of the Falange remained extremely circumscribed, and it won only 0.4 percent of votes cast in February 1936. However, in the spring the electoral victory of the leftist Popular Front led to the partial breakdown of law, order and work discipline. As during the Asturias Revolt of October 1934, the left became more revolutionary in its rhetoric and actions. Violent anti-clericalism and attacks on private property increased the membership of the very Catholic and authoritarian Falange. Radicalized youth from various social classes fled from the more moderate rightist parties or abandoned their previous apoliticism to join the fascist movement and combat what they believed was a coming communist revolution. The Falange’s bloody squadrismo against the left (and vice-versa) contributed to the collapse of democratic civility. José Antonio’s own violent temper and unrestrained loquaciousness caused his prolonged imprisonment—he assaulted a court official and insulted magistrates—and he ultimately remained in Republican jails during and after the eruption of the Civil War. At his trial in Alicante in November 1936, José Antonio sought to win over the leftist judges and jury by defending the Falange’s productivism: ‘All Spaniards who are not disabled are duty bound to work. The Nationalist Syndicalist state will not have the slightest respect for he who fulfills no function and aspires to live as a guest at the expense of others’ (230). He failed to convince the court, and the thirty-three-year-old leader of a violent movement which plotted to overthrow the Republic with the help of foreign powers was convicted and quickly executed. While imprisoned in August, José Antonio authored a truly patriotic, if not humanitarian, initiative to stop the war. He proposed the formation of a democratic, moderate government which would dissolve all militias (including the Falange’s), implement land reform, and guarantee non-partisan justice. Moreover, he offered to negotiate with the Nationalist generals. The polarization of both sides resulted in the rejection of his pacification plan and his surprisingly non-fascist effort to ‘save Spain’ (217)]. The Franco regime forbade the proposal’s publication since it contradicted the militant martyr image of José Antonio that the regime propagated throughout its existence. Furthermore, José Antonio’s proposal implicitly criticized the regime’s, and even the Falange’s, murderous waves of repression. His exceptional scheme did not mean that he had abandoned fascism, but like Communist policy during the Popular Front, the pacification plan merely postponed the coming (in this case, fascist) revolution. Franco took over leadership of the Falange in 1937 and used the party less as an instrument of social change and more to consolidate his own personal dictatorship. 1720 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS
Unfortunately, the translation contains numerous major and minor errors that mangle the quality and clarity of the author’s previous Spanish text. None the less, this judicious and outstanding biography is essential for all scholars of twentieth-century Spain.
MICHAEL SEIDMAN University of North Carolina Wilmington.
MAGGIE TORRES, Anarchism and Political Change in Spain: Schism, Polarisation and Reconstruction of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, 1939–1979. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. 2019. xxiii + 379 pp.
The end of the Spanish Civil War represented a traumatic defeat for the country’s anarchist movement and its principal organizational expression, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). How Spanish anarchists attempted to regroup in the decades that followed is the subject of Maggie Torres’ fascinating study. Her account is especially valuable for its extensive use of oral history: the work is partially based on participant testimony extracted from dozens of interviews carried out in the later years of the Spanish Transition. This allows the author to shed light on the more obscure aspects of this story, where documentary traces are scarce or inexistent. One of the first problems to account for is the way in which the Spanish movement in exile came to be dominated by the partnership of Germinal Esgleas and Federica Montseny. Leading figures within the movement during the Civil War, both had vigorously defended the wartime CNT’s collaboration with the Republican state, Montseny becoming Minister of Health in Largo Caballero’s government in November 1936. Nevertheless, under their leadership, the CNT in exile insisted on strict adhesion to the movement’s pre-war ‘apolitical’ tenets. In explaining this volte-face, Torres makes the convincing case that the pair, having incurred suspicion over numerous murky episodes, were effectively sidelined within the CNT by the end of the Second World War. As the majority position in the organization at this time favoured continued collaboration in anti-fascist coalitions, the couple’s only route back to an influential role was through a cynical and opportunistic defence of ‘purist’ anarchism. What remains somewhat enigmatic is how the couple were able to win and maintain positions of leadership given the transparently self-serving nature of their U-turn. The explanations provided here, of access to funds at a time of generalized hardship and a burst of post-WWII optimism being conducive to a growth of anarchist maximalism, provide only a partial answer to this question, which retains its relevance throughout the period under study. With former arch-collaborationists at the helm of the movement’s anti-collaborationist wing, a collective coming-to-terms with the war and its legacy was virtually impossible. Divided and riven with distrust and rumour, the movement in exile dwindled amidst expulsions and burnout, while the organization in Spain was subject to vicious repression. The exile leadership offered little to activists beyond a repetition of old certainties, while the ‘cincopuntista’ current in Spain became embroiled in an infamous rapprochement with the Francoist state’s vertical unions. In this context, Torres argues, when anarchism began to show signs of revival in Spain towards the end of the 1960s, it did not do so ‘with reference to the long history of Anarchism in Spain, but in the context of a deep crisis within Marxism’ (196). The reconstruction of the movement in the following decade was owing, at least in part, to the belated ‘discovery’ of the CNT by autonomous groups influenced by the libertarian tradition within Marxism, and in the context of a wave of wildcat strikes organized by workers’ assemblies that contrasted markedly with the bureaucratic legalism of the Communist Party. REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1721
As Spain entered the Transition, the CNT was reconstituted out of a convergence of such groups with veteran militants, newly emergent social movements, and a counter-cultural subculture keen to explore the limits of freedom in post-dictatorship Spain. Booming membership figures, exuberant rallies and combative labour struggles briefly thrust the CNT back to national prominence. Before any sustainable organizational coalition could consolidate itself, however, a debilitating power struggle—exacerbated by external repression—precluded the possibility of Spanish anarchism overcoming the evident generational and ideological fractures with which it had been reborn. At the heart of this struggle was the exiled leadership, who sought allies within Spain among the counter- cultural youth, against those who saw the CNT’s potential as primarily a trade union rooted in workplaces. Torres’ account is particularly strong in recreating the frustrations of this period and in identifying the underlying political issues, while her analysis is enhanced by personal recollections of the tensions that spilled over into violence during the internal debates at that time. The extensive use of interviews means that hitherto neglected areas of the historiography, such as the role of the assembly movement, heterodox Marxist influences and autonomous groups in the reconstruction of the CNT, are here treated with enlightening nuance and empathy, while the chapters on broader political developments in Spain provide crucial context. The work’s focus on and evocation of the radical politics and possibilities of the time make it a moving as well as important contribution to understanding the vicissitudes of Spanish anarchism as it struggled to emerge from the long shadows cast by its defeat.
DANNY EVANS Liverpool Hope University.
ANDREW CANESSA, Barrier and Bridge: Spanish and Gibraltarian Perspectives on Their Border. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. 2019. xv + 181 pp.
In Andrew Canessa’s earlier edited volume Bordering on Britishness: National Identity in Gibraltar from The Spanish Civil War to Brexit (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), he and others examined what the Gibraltar-Spain frontier meant to people based, mainly, in Gibraltar. This second volume, also arising from the ESRC-funded ‘Bordering on Britishness’ project, broadens out the scope of the first volume to include a focus on the La Línea side of the Gibraltar frontier, as well as the frontier between Ceuta and Morocco, and even the maritime frontier between Lampedusa and Tunisia. It incorporates oral history testimonies sourced as part of the ‘Bordering on Britishness’ project in addition to testimony collected through separate projects conducted by Beatriz Díaz Martínez on La Línea, Brian Campbell on Ceuta, and Giacomo Orsini on Lampedusa. The result is a richly detailed examination of frontier life in small enclaves in the western Mediterranean. Each of the volume’s chapters draw upon a wealth of primary research and secondary literature offering interesting and insightful analyses not only of their subject but on the nature, purpose and meaning of borders and barriers between territories. Space precludes an exhaustive appreciation, so I will limit myself to two of the stand out chapters, Campbell’s chapter on Ceuta and Díaz’s chapter on La Línea. Campbell’s work turns away from the dominant focus of analysis on the Ceuta-Morocco border, the dangers posed to those who wish to cross it, and instead examines how the Spanish community in Ceuta has adapted to the diverse cultures and ethnic groups who now reside or work there. Drawing upon interviews with a diverse group of participants, 1722 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS
Campbell also weaves into his narrative his own experiences of life in Ceuta gained through extensive fieldwork. Campbell examines the concept of convivencia in Ceuta, in theory a public celebration of the city’s embrace of a mix of ethno-religious groups. This analysis chimes nicely with a similar narrative deployed by Gibraltarians in relation to their own community which is examined in Martínez, Canessa and Orsini’s chapter later in the volume. As in the Gibraltar case, this portrayed harmony is not always matched in reality. In Ceuta, Campbell witnessed Spanish citizens undertaking various Christian-Spanish rituals and rites which were designed to throw the ‘otherness’ of non-Spanish Christians into sharp relief. One such rite, the ‘Oath of the Flag’, in which Ceuta’s military legion parade the Spanish flag for people to kiss and swear fealty to, was one such event. But Campbell shows nicely how even this was not as simple as it seems—whilst some were persuaded to participate others were overwhelmed. At the end of the ritual, one observer turned to Campbell and simply commented ‘“[b]loody hell, that was intense!”’(61). Campbell captures the difficulty of narratives such as convivencia nicely, but his deep and embedded knowledge of the community gives this narrative considerable nuance. Díaz’s chapter on La Línea draws upon extensive research with groups of senior citizens in La Línea which included films, debates, visits to places of significance in Gibraltar and La Línea, and written diaries. And whereas archival records have tended to favour the stories of men (at least in the historiography of Gibraltar) Diaz’s methods and their focus on daily life garnered considerable evidence of the experiences of women. The story that emerges is one where La Línea, as a frontier town, acted as a suburb to Gibraltar’s metropolitan military and commercial economy. By and large in the latter part of the twentieth century, La Línea’s inhabitants suffered horrendous poverty. Women spent a considerable amount of time evading being stolen into prostitution either by those seeking to supply the military of Gibraltar with prostitutes or else those looking for vulnerable women to traffic elsewhere in Spain. Worse still, under the Franco regime those who were identified as supporters of the Republic, or who had left-wing sympathies, were liable to jail or execution. Even those whose politics were considered merely dubious could face blacklisting from employment, leading to petty crime and the need to undertake smuggling from Gibraltar, a risky business in itself, to make a living. The richness in detail here adds considerably, especially in the English language, to our understanding of life in La Línea and the relationship between those who lived there and Gibraltar. Taken as a whole, this volume represents a serious and scholarly contribution to studies of communities living on borderlands. It will appeal to scholars of migration and nationalism, as well as to those who have specific interest in the geographical areas studied. And taken with Canessa’s Bordering on Britishness, these two volumes together offer a notable sociological and historical advance in studies of twentieth-century Gibraltar.
CHRIS GROCOTT University of Leicester.
JOSEBA GABILONDO, Introduction to a Postnational History of Contemporary Basque Literature (1978–2000): Remnants of the Nation. Woodbridge/Rochester, NY: Tamesis. 2019. xiii + 338 pp.
Remnants of the Nation is the second in a trilogy of books by Joseba Gabilondo which purport to tell the story of Basque literature—or, better, the multiple and competing stories of that literature’s evolution—in response to the challenges and affordances of an ever-shifting political landscape in which nationalism is a constant, in all its conflicting and contradictory avatars. Originally published in 2006 as Nazioaren hondarrak, Gabilondo’s Remnants of the REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1723
Nation complements his Before Babel (Self-published: Barbaroak, 2016), which provides a more comprehensive historical overview of the development of Basque letters and his 2013 New York- Martutene: Euskal postnazionalismoaren utopiaz eta globalizazio neoliberalaren krisiaz (Bilbo: Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Argitalpen Zerbitzua, yet to appear in English translation), which takes Ramon Saizarbitoria’s 2012 novel as a touchstone for reading Basque literature in the new millennium. The accent in Remnants of the Nation falls on the period between Bernardo Atxaga’s Ethiopia (1978) and the emergence of the voices of important women writers at the end of the last century. Throughout, the primary recurring themes include the construction of a national allegory, the documentation of the crisis into which national allegory falls, and the emergence of postnationalism as an essential critical concept that binds literary and political discourse together. The book is divided into three sections. Remnants opens with three essays which establish a theoretical framework for the studies that follow. Jürgen Habermas provides a foil for Gabilondo, who argues that Habermas’ notion of postnationalism is unsatisfactory: it cannot account for the heterogeneity of the cultural and political worlds of the Basque Country nor the ways that the Basque Country resists reduction to the kinds of (post)national allegories customarily associated with monolithic states. What Habermas offers, for Gabilondo, is therefore not postnationalism at all but rather a form of neonationalism, an empty gesture which promises to move beyond nationalist ideologies even as it surreptitiously reifies them instead. The second section of Remnants, ‘Writing the Nation’, focuses on the pivotal role played by Bernardo Atxaga in the articulation, and later disarticulation, of the Basque national allegory. Gabilondo devotes special attention to the quintessential roles played by Atxaga’s Ethiopia (1978) and his masterpiece Obabakoak (1988) in the constitution of Basque literary modernism and the construction of a canon predicated on a particular kind of national allegory. The final section of the volume features five essays which focus on a younger generation of writers, and, in particular, the significance of Basque women’s writing at the end of the century. Gabilondo suggests that the task of creating a postnationalist literary space will at the same time be the task of imagining the ways in which gender and sexuality interrupt and complicate those same neo-liberal, ‘globalist’ cultural and political projects that would otherwise offer us old nationalisms in new guises. It is difficult to think of a scholar in the English-speaking academic world who has done more than Gabilondo to bring modern Basque literature into dialogue with the questions and tools that demarcate the intersection of political and literary discourse. As a theorist and conceptual cartographer, Gabilondo is consistently interesting and often provocative; as a careful reader of literary texts, he is resourceful and illuminating. To mention a single example, his reading of the work of Itxaro Borda, a relatively unheralded Basque writer from Bayonne, is fine- grained, nuanced and inviting: one cannot come away from Gabilondo’s chapter on her work without feeling that she must now become an indispensable interlocutor for any scholar who had confined his or her reading of Basque narrative to authors and works from Hegoalde. That is not to say that the book is not without its blemishes. Most of the chapters were originally published in a range of publications over a seven-year period. As one might expect of essays produced on different occasions for different audiences, they are not always even in tone, quality and relevance. It is thus unsurprising that one sometimes feels that the author tills again and again the same patch of theoretical ground, even while some promising avenues of investigation hinted at elsewhere are never fully developed. One might take issue as well with the unusual decision to render in English the titles of literary works originally composed in Euskera and which remain untranslated. Gabilondo’s explanations notwithstanding, it is ungainly and unhelpful. But these concerns are, of course, trivial. It is to Gabilondo’s credit that, early in the book, he explicitly acknowledges his debt to the pioneers of the philological tradition in which he was trained. In Remnants of the Nation he has produced a work of scholarship that honours that tradition by demonstrating that he has absorbed it and moved beyond it. Indeed, one imagines that just as Gabilondo has honoured 1724 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS the work of his predecessors, future generations of scholars will likewise come to regard his own work as indispensable for their scholarship as well.
DAVID LARAWAY Brigham Young University, Utah.
GARCIA DE ORTA, Coloquios de los simples. Translated and edited by Raquel Madrigal Martínez. Faro: Sílabas e Desafios. 2018. 303 pp.
Garcia de Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India [Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India] was the first printed book specifically dedicated to Asian materia medica. Published in Goa by Joannes de Endem in 1563, it provided a vast array of medical and natural historical information on various plants, fruits, spices and minerals. Amidst the variability of natural products, it also attempted to offer a guiding system for regularization that covered language, prices, places of origin, morphological and sensory attributes as well as uses according to specific circumstances and bodies. In addition, the work presented information about indigenous methods of healing as well as a far-reaching assessment of ancient and modern authors on the subject. The Colloquies were intended for a wide audience. They were aimed at physicians, apothecaries, merchants and other potential readers in India, but also at fellow physicians and naturalists back in Europe. They were written in a dialogic format, which was more dynamic than a treatise, but presented problems in terms of organization. The relationship between different topics was not easy to follow and the format encouraged various digressions from purely medical or natural historical subjects. This characteristic was noted early on by Carolus Clusius, the first diligent reader of the Colloquies and the editor of a commentated adaption of the work in Latin in 1567. Four editions followed, all with reformulated comments and images. Moreover, his edition served as the basis for translations of the work into Italian and French. The early success of the Colloquies in Europe was due to Clusius’ version, which changed its format and language and which discarded all digressions and paratexts. However, Orta’s personal, social and political world, as perceived from the Colloquies, was very much erased. Nineteenth-century Portuguese translations of the original work (1872; I, 1891; II, 1895) as well as more recent translations into other languages—English (2013), French (2004), Portuguese (2018) and Spanish (2018) correspond to the desire not only to publish the work in its entirety, but also to recover its wider meaning within the context in which it was produced and published. After all, the Colloquies are as much a literary text as a medical and natural historical one. The Introduction to the recent Spanish edition of the Colloquies is by Hélio J. S. Alves. It is very brief and is based mainly on a few of the paratexts of the work. It focuses on the obligations of Garcia de Orta and Luís de Camões to the highly-influential aristocrat Martim Afonso de Sousa. Special attention is also given to Camões’ Ode to the Conde de Redondo. Both this and other excerpts from poems of the period are analysed in the context of Renaissance humanist culture. This is the angle from which Orta’s work is presented, but the reader would certainly welcome a fuller perspective on why the Colloquies proved to be such an important and influential work. It would also be pertinent to provide information about their influence on sixteenth-century Spain. This might include, for example, why Juan Fragoso and Cristóbal Acosta appropriated knowledge presented in the original version of the Colloquies. One of the things that is really missing from this edition is an introduction by the translator explaining why one particular copy of the Colloquies was chosen for the translation as well as the system of notes adopted and the criteria of transcription. It is from REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1725 a footnote that we know that the translation is based mainly on a copy of the original work now held at the Biblioteca Pública de Évora (BPE-RES Res. 0480). Another footnote informs the reader that when some information was missing from the original, the translator made use of the Conde de Ficallho’s seminal edition of the Colloquies (I, 1891; II, 1895). Throughout the text, we also become aware that a significant number of notes come from this heavily- annotated edition. On the positive side, it should be stressed that in the ‘Translator’s Notes’, she is very careful to indicate the full biographical reference from which she has taken the information. In addition, the total number of notes (253), including the ones by the translator and the ones by Orta, seems well-balanced for an edition of the Colloquies.It should also be added that the edition includes the translation of the original Table of Contents which lack pagination. It would benefit the reader if the translator had presented a short, paginated index at the beginning of the work. Overall, Raquel Madrigal Martínez’s translation is written in a proficient and elegant style and she is attentive to historical rigour. In spite of some limitations, this new translation of the Colloquies into Spanish is a very welcome addition to studies of Orta’s work. Indeed, its value is even greater due to the fact that this is the first translation of the Colloquies ever published in Spanish.
PALMIRA FONTES DA COSTA Universidade Nova de Lisboa/ Centro Interuniversitário de História da Ciência e Tecnologia.
MINA GARCÍA SOORMALLY, Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire. Louisville: University Press of Colorado. 2018. xviii + 220 pp.
This learned but sometimes meandering volume attempts to address some important questions about the notion of idolatry in the colonial Americas: How was idolatry defined? How did it relate to other crimes against the Catholic faith? How was the notion of idolatry transformed in American soil? Rather than scrutinizing the sources that other scholars have used to address these important questions—trial documents, ecclesiastical records, correspondence, or royal decrees—the author favours a journey through printed theological works and chronicles, plays, and a narrow selection of the historiography of efforts against idolatry in New Spain and colonial Peru. Chapter 1 goes over the well-tilled territory of definitions of idolatry by church doctors, theologians and ecclesiastics between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even if its final conclusion, which emphasizes the plasticity of the notion of idolatry, is one applicable to the Americas, the path this chapter chooses is rambunctious, as it takes us from the nominalist teachings of Franciscan author Pedro de Ciruelo to Kramer and Sprenger’sinfluential Malleus maleficarum, then back to Thomistic thought, then forward to Andean idolatry extirpators Cristobal de Molina and Francisco de Ávila, and then on to a hypothetical Erasmist critique of popular religion. The chapter’s final section provides a useful reminder of Martin Luther’s doctrine about idolatry, and its influence on Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin, and dwells briefly on the irony of Spanish ecclesiastics who accused indigenous subjects of idolatry shortly after Luther levelled a comparable charge against the Roman church. Chapter 2 weaves multiple strands culled from a variety of historical sources in order to craft a narrative that revisits the incorporation and expulsion of non-Christian subjects into the newly consolidated Spanish monarchy. The author begins with the briefest of sketches regarding fray Juan de Zumárraga’s earliest role as Inquisitor in Navarra and his activities as first apostolic Inquisitor in New Spain, then returns to the Reconquista, passing through 1726 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS
Machiavelli’s characterization of Ferdinand of Aragon’s ‘pious cruelty’ policies against Muslims, addresses the Catholic othering of Jews and Muslims, notes Columbus’ thoughts regarding the spiritual malleability of Caribs, remarks on the forced Christianization and subjugation of the Canary Islands, and ends with Cortés’ and Díaz del Castillo’s representation of the Mesoamerica they encountered as a landscape of idolatry. The third chapter addresses some theatrical works in an effort to shed light on idolatry in New Spain. It possesses a tighter temporal focus, which corresponds to Zumárraga’s punishment of indigenous idolatry in the diocese of Mexico in the 1530s. As other scholars have done in previous works, the author sketches Zumárraga’s case against the Tetzcoca nobleman don Carlos, and summarizes information about a subset of these trials. In an innovative turn, the chapter then turns to a comparison of the representation of infidels in three sources: the Nahua theatrical reenactment of the conquest of Jerusalem, the denunciation of Jews in volumes by Archbishop of Granada Hernando de Talavera, and the work of the playwright and New Spain resident Fernán González de Eslava. The volume’s final chapter examines the first glimmers of the Guadalupan devotion as it was decisively embraced by Archbishop Montúfar. While the chapter begins, rather startingly, by presenting Lasso de la Vega’s 1649 apparition account as if it were a historical document, the account eventually returns to Edmundo O’Gorman’s sober and critical Guadalupan historiography. Venturing into a less trodden path, a section in this chapter provides useful comparisons between the canonical account of the Tepeyacac apparitions, the late medieval Cantigas de Santa María, and the deployment of the Virgin of Candelaria during the evangelization of the Canary Islands. Finally, an Appendix reproduces three historical documents on idolatry, the expulsion of the Jews, and Juan Diego’s 2002 canonization. While this work criss-crosses in kinetic ways the broad historical terrain between late- medieval and sixteenth-century notions of the Infidel Other in Iberia and New Spain, there are a few gaps in the book’s coverage. Those exist, in particular, in terms of the historiography of Nahuatl theatre, Tetzcoca history, Zumárraga’s Inquisitions in Euskadi and Anahuac, and works that have already addressed comparisons among idolatry eradication projects in Mexico, Peru, and the investigation and prosecution of Muslims after the Reconquista. In the end, however, the author’s arguments are sustained by a carefully curated selection of primary sources, some of which deserve to be better known by scholars and students of idolatry in early colonial Spanish America.
DAVID TAVÁREZ Vassar College, New York.
VICTORIA LYNN GARRETT, Performing Everyday Life in Argentine Popular Theater, 1890–1934. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. x + 226 pp.
This book is a much-needed tool for understanding Argentina’s popular theatre during the period 1890–1934. In this work, Victoria Garrett studies a very important body of plays, including a profound analysis of their cultural, social and political contexts. In Chapter 1, ‘Performing Everyday Life’, Garrett contextualizes the sainete and the grotesco criollo, focusing on the life of criollos and immigrants. According to the author, both groups ‘found an outlet for culture agency in popular theatre, which allowed them to negotiate symbolically their inclusion in civil society’ (24). That kind of theatre was appealing to audiences of any literacy level. As a starting point in her analysis, Garrett focuses on the conventillos (tenements) as the ‘social stage’ on which play a rich spectrum of characters representing life in the cosmopolitan city. Exploring the relationships of REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1727 power and popular culture the author includes ‘what is produced by the masses but also what is consumed’ (31). In Chapter 2, ‘Performing Inclusion and Disillusion’, Garrett analyses four plays written by Nemesio Trejo: La fiesta de don Marcos (1890), Los óleos del chico (1892), Los inquilinos (1907) and Las mujeres lindas (1916). In her analysis, Garrett exposes the liberal political and economic system in which the exploitation of the poor is the norm, and which creates more marginality. Those plays are contextualized in the modernization of Argentina, in which most characters are the victims of a liberal system that brought technological ‘advancement’ and the consequences of the loss of traditional work. The author analyses the situation of women as the main victims of the patriarchal system, and deals with ethical considerations that the characters need to confront in their families’ daily fight to make a living. In Chapter 3, ‘Embodying Modernity’, the author analyses Armando Discépolo plays: El viaje aquél (1914; co-authored with Rafael José de la Rosa), Mateo (1923), Babilonia: una hora entre criados (1925) and El relojero, (1934). These plays criticize the unjust social order with a new and very effective aesthetic created by Discépolo: the ‘grotesco criollo’. By creating characters that are suffering from economic depression, and mixing them with ‘absurd’ and comical situations, the author crafts a genre that had an impact on the Argentinean theatre of that time and continues to nowadays. While analysing Discépolo’s very successful works, Garrett refers to the ‘resignification of liberalism’, emphasizing the ‘dark side of progress’, and criticizing a system of ‘institutionalized crime and corruption’ (90). It is through her analysis of such market-driven capitalism that the author makes significant ethical considerations. Class struggle is placed at the centre of modernization, with one clear loser in that system: ‘There is no place of honor reserved for honest, hard workers, nor are they respected’ (92). But, at the same time, Garrett concludes that throughout Discépolo’s plays ‘a variety of discourse, songs, embodied performance, and symbols create alternative narratives and construct dignified identities for the popular classes’ (93). In Chapter 4, ‘Modern Families and Degeneration’, the author centres her analysis on the role of women in society by studying the image of women in these plays: Música criolla (1906) by Carlos Mauricio Pacheco and Pedrito E. Pico, and Florencio Sánchez’s La pobre gente (1904), Barranca abajo (1905) and Nuestros hijos (1907). Garrett analyses the contradictions between society’s expectations of women and their material needs. This helps the reader to get a better understanding of gender roles and the development of families within modernity. In Chapter 5, ‘Sex, Desire, and Violence’, Garrett expands the analysis of gender in popular theatre with one additional element: the conceptualization of the family ‘as an institution of abuse and exploitation’ (129). The plays analysed in this section are: Discépolo’s Entre el hierro (1910), José González Castillo’s La serenata, (1911) and Florencio Sánchez’s Marta Gruni (1910). In her analysis Garrett considers family as a microcosm of society, a place in which traditional values are emphasized in order to maintain a system in which gender discrimination and economic problems predominate. In Chapter 6, ‘Criollos, Caudillos, and the Violent State’, the author continues describing an unjust social and political system that increases poverty, through these plays of ‘popular criollo theater’: Eduardo Gutierrez and José Podestá’s dramatic version of Juan Moreira (1886), Ezequiel Soria’s Justicia Criolla (1897), Trejo’s Libertad de sufragio (1894) and Los políticos (1897). According to Garrett’s vey complete analysis ‘these works highlight the incompatibility in Argentina of export capitalism with democratic institutions’. In the last chapter, ‘Performing Protest’, Garrett criticizes Argentina’s ‘biopolitical institutions like the National Department of Hygiene purported to safeguard citizens’ bodies against a wide range of microbial threats, which they usually associated with foreigners, the working classes, strikers, protesters, and anarchists’ (189). According to the author, that notion is challenged in the plays she analyses in this chapter: Carlos Mauricio Pacheco’s Los disfrazados (1906), El diablo en el conventillo (1916), Barracas (1918) and Armando Discépolo’s La Fragua (1912). 1728 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS
Garrett concludes that the four interrelated realms of liberal modernity that constituted sources of harm, described in the género chico criollo are: the economic, the moral, the political, and the ecological. Through Garrett’s analysis of an important number of plays in her book Performing Everyday Life in Argentine Popular Theater, 1890–1934, the reader can not only better understand the historical period in which they were written but also its social and economic system. In doing so, we can have a new insight in the world’s current situation as well as in many of the plays that can be seen in today’s stages, particularly those from Latin-American countries.
EDUARDO CABRERA Millikin University, Illinois.
ALFREDO BRYCE ECHENIQUE, La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña. Edición, con introducción, de Julio Ortega y María Fernanda Lander. Madrid: Cátedra, 2019. 644 pp.
In his Introduction to the sixth Cátedra edition of La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña (1st ed., 1981) Julio Ortega makes the case that, among Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s works, this is ‘su novela mayor y la más característica de su talante biográfico y talento narrativo’ (13). One of the traits that distinguishes La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña from the other contender for that crown, Un mundo para Julius (1970), is persistent postmodern playfulness. Ortega describes the protagonist as being ‘tan inmerso en la cultura popular como sólo podría estarlo un sujeto de la urbanidad post moderna’ (31). Allusions to Hollywood films, Peruvian politics, Mexican television and many literatures, particularly the Parisian writings of Ernest Hemingway and Marcel Proust, rub shoulders in the narrator’s verbal outpouring. A powerful orality unites La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña and Un mundo para Julius. The differences, though, outweigh the similarities. While Un mundo para Julius is confined to the closed society of the upper bourgeoisie of 1950s Lima, as perceived by a young boy, La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña captures Latin-American expatriate life in Paris in the build-up to the May 1968 student uprisings. Martín participates reluctantly in ‘el Grupo’ alongside his upper-class wife, Inés, who is converted from a Catholic conservative, to a revolutionary Marxist, outlook on life. The group does little other than make pronouncements about the need for revolution in Peru. To repudiate his privileged class status, Martín, an aspiring writer, churns out a doctrinaire social realist novel. María Fernanda Lander, in her essay on the theme of May 1968 in La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña, characterizes the narrator’s comic non-conformism with the petty ideological structures of el Grupo as ‘la búsqueda del individuo por la expresión más personal y verdadera’ (36), in reaction against both the conformism imposed by consumer society and the need to act out the reductive stereotype of the revolutionary Latin-American intellectual in Paris. This edition’s footnotes, which are extremely helpful in illuminating Peruvian modismos, and very thorough on asides about Hemingway, remain silent on various Proustian allusions such as repeated reference to ‘muchachitas en flor’ (262–63), tea-drinking dandies (276–67) and ‘Magdalenas’ (373). As in Un mundo para Julius, the novel’s strength is its narrative voice, which is irrepressible, punning and self-deprecating. Yet a contemporary reader cannot help but be aware that while Julius in the former novel is a child who is constricted by the prying, censorious voices of a gossipy collectivity that sets limits on who he may become, the narrative voice in La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña is that of an economically REVIEWS OF BOOKS 1729 privileged Latin-American man speaking in the first person. As much as Martín subverts machista conceptions of Latin-American masculinity, it is difficult for a contemporary reader to react as sympathetically to him as might have been the case in 1981. We have higher standards for male sensitivity. When Inés abandons Martín in the middle of the May 1968 uprising to devote herself to making revolution, his response is to flee to Spain with a young American woman with whom he has fallen in love. The affair is comic and readable, yet Martín, for all of his extraordinary perceptiveness, reflects little on the implications of his infidelity. The oligarchical assumption—satirized in Un mundo para Julius—that upper-class men have the right to mistresses is too deeply internalized to be subjected to serious questioning. Just as the novel’s gender politics feel dated—the same is often said of the other great 1960s novel of Latin-American Paris, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963)—so the postmodernism feels less aesthetically striking than it may have done at the time. In Paris Martín Romaña meets a Peruvian writer who is less political and more successful than he: Alfredo Bryce Echenique. The tension between narrator and historical author accounts for some wonderful comic moments. When Martín grows unbearably lugubrious as his marriage begins to collapse, the author walks into the protagonist’s flat and gives him the punch in the face he so richly deserves: ‘Bryce Echenique le pidió permiso a Inés para noquearme y me noqueó’ (522). In the end, though, the authorial presence is overplayed. To a contemporary reader, familiar with autofiction and Facebook narcissism, the author’s insistence on inserting himself into the narrative crosses the line from postmodernism to self-absorption. Even a notorious scandal over a literary prize Bryce Echenique failed to receive is aired at length. In the novel’s final 100 pages, Martín suffers a medical crisis. In the gruellingly detailed description of his treatment, the narrator’s comic tone yields to one of self-pity. The resolution is more balanced, as Martín, reflecting on his life with greater perspective, understands that his divorce was a precondition for becoming a writer, and that without this experience, ‘casi me quedo sin llegar a ser yo’ (642). Less structurally perfect than Un mundo para Julius, La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña remains an energetic testimony of life in Latin-American Paris in the 1960s.
STEPHEN HENIGHAN University of Guelph.
MARCY SCHWARTZ, Public Pages: Reading along the Latin American Streetscape. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2018. xvii + 286 pp.; 74 illustrations.
Early on in her study of urban reading in contemporary Latin America, Marcy Schwartz argues for ‘contemporary public reading’ as an activity that ‘creates participatory citizens’ (8). This is an old idea, and her Introduction traces it back to Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the ‘public sphere’ and the long tradition of elite-driven educational reform and literacy drives chronicled in Angel Ramas’ La ciudad letrada (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1984). On the question of just how effectively literacy translates into active citizenship, a point many nineteenth-century reformers took almost on faith, Schwartz relies not on an index from political scientists or historians but on years spent chronicling the efforts of local governments, national governments, well-connected NGOs, and ad-hoc collective groups. These readings and interviews add up to a narrative of efforts to, as she puts it ‘harness literary reading and insert it into public space for the public good’ (17). The distinction is an important one. If the question of ‘whether reading really worked’ looks for a separate variable on which to register 1730 BSS, XCVI (2019) REVIEWS OF BOOKS the gain in active citizenship, Schwartz is most interested in public reading that makes literacy and citizenship one in the same and simultaneous. She pushes her readers to consider the social and political consequences of a belief in public reading, or the idea that interaction with written texts will materially change the world in which we live. The study itself is geographically broad, encompassing urban settings in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru, and the structure is organic without becoming overly symmetrical. Argentina receives the most attention as chapters focus, respectively, on Bogotá and Buenos Aires’ shared status as ‘World Book Capitals’; Bogotá and Santiago as sites of literary projects centred on public transport; public reading in Buenos Aires as a reaction to the financial crisis of the early 2000s; the phenomenon of handmade cartonera publishing in Buenos Aires and other locales in Brazil and Peru; and the sustained interest in banned- book libraries in post-dictatorship Argentina. What unites these disparate local and temporal realities is the notion of reading as a public activity, a form of free association rather than a solitary communion of eyes and the page (or eyes and the screen). Schwartz is most interested in what we might call the ‘how’ question of building political community around physical texts that are supposedly disappearing in the age of the Internet. She thus interviews organizers, authors and readers, and focuses a lot of attention on individual projects, taking time clearly to narrate how the organizations in question manage to, say, put free books in the hands of subway commuters in Bogotá or Santiago, or assemble new ones from cardboard scraps found in the streets. Many projects blur the line between writer and reader, a daunting border in the eras that La ciudad letrada explored, by collecting the writings of members of the public, who reformers of another era might have imagined only as potential readers. In the chapter on reading in Buenos Aires in the wake of the financial crisis of the early 2000s, she traces how the creation of reading clubs and community libraries served as a means of rebuilding the neighbourhood-centred civic organizations that had largely been destroyed by the dictatorship. Buenos Aires is also the starting point for the stunning chapter on cartonera publishing which, she argues, allows readers to take the means of literary production into their own hands and makes the consumption and production of books a collective political act rather than a solitary form of consumption. The Internet, destroyer of so much of the traditional publishing industry, maintains an ominous presence slightly offstage throughout much of the study. On the one hand the casual destruction and fragmentation that is one characteristic of the era of social media seems to mirror what Schwartz sees as the broader consequences of neo-liberalism in Latin America. On the other hand, the physical object so important to the cartonera publishers and the organizers of neighbourhood libraries accomplishes some things that mobile devices and computers cannot. In a world of creeping government and corporate surveillance the book remains a media device that, as Duncan White has put it, ‘cannot know when you are sharing it with others’ (New York Times, 3 October 2019). This study will be of great interest to scholars of contemporary reading, education, and cultural production in Latin America, as well as to anyone with a stake in the question of how local organizing and the printed book might continue to serve as a focal point for imagination and politics in an increasingly digital world.
RONALD BRIGGS Barnard College, New York.