“A thousand eyes hide the night”: a literary cathedral

This was in 1996. It was fitted to the car I was using at the time. I randomly tuned the dial of the in-dash radio looking for a music radio format and suddenly I came upon the inimitable Seville voice of Carlos Herrera speaking (perhaps into the microphones from RNE) with an author who had just written a novel. entitled “The Hero’s Masks”. This is how I heard the voice of Juan Manuel de Prada for the first time before starting to read his initiatory works: “Pussys”, “The Silence of the Skater” and this monumental “The Masks of the Hero”. A novel, as I never tire of proclaiming it since then, through writing and living words, a reference for contemporary Spanish storytelling. A major work, perhaps inappropriate for someone whose mental maturity was frightening, within a large body, eminently young and sheltered behind plastic-rimmed glasses. Nearly three decades and acclaim later (with countless notable novels and awards in between), Juan Manuel de. Prada takes the first person narrator of the novel that placed and consolidated him on the literary map (without having to receive the Planeta prize, which will arrive a little later), and offers us a gigantic novel (or at least his first part), in the purest sense of the term, which refers to its volume, and in which it refers to its literary breadth, since no one is surprised by the attestation that De Prada plays in another league, one almost exclusive league, where one must really be bored, because there are not many rivals (perhaps none or none) who can compete with him, against his prose, against his erudition. Related news Standard POETRY No “What the bee seeks”: a few crumbs of. bread on the windowsill Fermín Herrero The latest poetry prize ‘Ciudad de Salamanca’ brings together fifty poems of shocking nudity, difficult to achieve thanks to the repulsive, cynical, sly and climbing figure of Fernando Navales, a phalangist in the service of the police officer Pedro Urraca – another bird of ill omen – the author takes us, on a journey back in time, to the Paris occupied by the Nazi steamroller during the Second World War. And in this random and precarious scenario, he constructs a choral and grotesque novel, where he depicts, with fierce sarcasm in most cases, this group of Spanish artists exiled in the French capital after our civil war. These eight hundred pages, which cover the German occupation during the years 1940 and 1941, feature dissident (and barely surviving) poets, writers, sculptors, painters, actors and fashion designers, to whom Navales , following the dictates of Urraca, who will help him. growing up with Ambassador Lequerica and surviving among the invading military commanders, he will try to attract the dark side of the Phalanx created by “the Absent” José Antonio Primo de Rivera, by deceiving them with sweet promises fabricated with impunity to the measure of each particular ego Luis Alberto de Cuenca assures in the pages of this newspaper that De Prada has built a cathedral of language. No one in their right mind would dispute this sentence, but, if I may, I would like, if not to correct it, at least to broaden it, because, in this exquisite, varied, biting, brilliant language, from this time to time and very current to others, full of words that only a magician like him can pull out of his hat – galloferos, corner rubers, trapalandranes – we must add some exuberant and continuous comparisons, numerous asides and explanatory digressions and some dismembering and schizophrenic descriptions of the majority of the characters that Navales He represents (and treats) the throat, resorting to ornithological, zangolotine, pachydermic profiles and other subtleties and semantic trifles that allude to abdominal dimensions, carp appetites or sheep shit respirations. And, as De Prada says, when he tells Navales to his (alleged) superior Velilla, the narrator protagonist completely hates, infected with resentment.Editorial Espasa A thousand eyes hide the night Juan Manuel de Prada 800 pages 24.90 eurosMay- be, as a warning to sailors, the Colombian writer Vargas Vila warns Navales that to become famous you have to get slanderers to believe in a monstrous legend around you. This same legend that Juan Manuel de Prada himself supports in the face of his legion of detractors (I am afraid with the broad swimming shoulders of the diplomat Lequerica), which speaks to us once again of his graphomaniac character, comparable to that of that luxury high school player who in the novel is César González Ruano (Ruanito for friends like Navales), and who led him to conclude the handwriting with the tip of his thumb burst, his middle finger with a twisted distal phalanx and a callus the size of a chickpea. But the wear and tear of the bones, the tearing of muscles and the hardening of the epidermis will have been worth it since, if “The Masks of the Hero” was a monumental novel, this one is perhaps the cathedral of 21st century literature. century. And I use a hypothetical or doubtful tense because we have not yet discovered the stature of the second part, the other eight hundred pages which remain to fall into our hands and which tell (I suppose), among many other zarabandas , the rest of the German occupation of the universal capital of culture and art and the miseries that Hispanic literati continued to endure among its monuments, its cafes and its streets. To conclude, it is true that this first part of “A Thousand Eyes Hide the Night” could. be a standalone entity, but I very much doubt that after reading it, anyone will resist discovering what follows this prolonged and suggestive pontoon that says “to be continued.”

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