The best way to disengage is to end up transforming yourself and your work. Something like that must have considered Jose Angel Mañas and he did well to turn his iconic "Kronen Stories" into a transition to something else.
The perfect formula to escape and continue; to swim and store clothes. The solution was to end up presenting a tetralogy and saying goodbye to a clearly youthful imaginary. And later, Mañas already dedicated himself to other things.
Literary escapism typical of another great narrator of Generation X. A generation of creators still halfway between analog and digital. And, therefore, still inheritors of the tangible world of creativity from improvisation, of ingenuity dug into nothing. Among all of these, there are types as varied as Palahniuk but also Gomez-Jury.
In the particular case of Mañas, they later arrived crime novels, historical fictions and even essays. Sometimes returning to those beginnings as someone who revisits places where he was happy, with another perspective, yes ...
So it never hurts to go around the bibliography Tricks so as not to stop being surprised ...
Top 3 recommended novels by José Ángel Mañas
The last spree
The consequences are inevitable, as Bunbury would say in one of his songs. And inevitable was to reopen the door of the Kronen. Because after the fever, many are those who enjoy those distant echoes of the nascent electronic music, as a soundtrack to the lost youth ...
But the years go by. And both author and characters face this reunion with weights on their shoulders and notions about life light years away from those unstoppable flashes. Recovering certain highlights is never easy, nor is it hardly possible. And any effort can end in the most unexpected way.
They were in their early twenties at the time: a group of friends who met at the Kronen bar and consumed their youth through sex, alcohol, and drugs. On some occasions they flirted with death and there were even those who came out badly from that flirtation.
A lot of time has passed. Exactly twenty-five years have passed. Now they work and do not earn a bad living; some have married and have children. Almost none of them use drugs and drunkenness has turned into oenology.
When Carlos receives news that completely shakes his life, he feels the need to meet again with his friend Pedro, whom he has not seen for many years. Maybe it will be nothing more than a reunion to remember some moments from the past, or maybe it will become the beginning of The Last Spree.
Conquerors of the impossible
We talked recently about Elvira Rock as an essential writer against black legends and other phobias of Spanish. On this occasion it is Mañas himself who dives into the historical genre to novel the epic of those days when two worlds met to finish rounding the Earth.
With its chiaroscuro, of course, but with the feeling that under the premises of understanding the human condition without fuss, with its sometimes egomaniacal ambitions, the arrival of the Spanish in America was above all a desire for knowledge and subsequent miscegenation.
Starting in the mythical year of 1492, and for the next six decades, a country that has just completed an epic reconquest will discover, conquer and colonize an immense continent that until then has remained closed to the rest of the world.
Who were Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, Bartolomé de las Casas or Lope de Aguirre? Who accompanied him on those trips and what did they find in those lands? What made them return again and again to the fascinating New World?
With his characteristic realistic style, José Ángel Mañas novels the greatest epic in the history of Spain, recreating the dramatic circumstances of the most extraordinary adventure starring any nation.
Historias del Kronen
All those 90's guys saw the movie. More like a reflection of what had to be than as a moralizing intention. Time is another thing during youth, the bad thing if it has to happen, it will happen tomorrow. Because the present and its excesses could not have any relevance among the magic of the moment.
A gang of idle twentysomethings plummet into Madrid's most oppressive and decadent summer without knowing that their search for sensations will forever change their lives.
Beyond being the novel that gave name to a generation (between the initial, for its absolute narrative mastery and the premonition of many of the entropic symptoms that, in the midst of the euphoria of the development boom, it was unique in diagnosing.
Against the insignificance of the “light” literature to use, a torn voice, dark face of the Spanish Dream was raised in the line of our best novelistic tradition, from picaresque to tremendous existentialism, passing through the revolution of Anglo-Saxon dirty realism with whose masterpieces can certainly be equated.
