Yesterday is history. In the same way that any decade of the XNUMXth century, however close it may be, is already part of a history that those of us who go through part of this century still feel as part of our lives.
And in that dual space between memory and historical events, Eduardo Mendoza offers us a story that takes advantage of the alternation between the objective and a subjectivity that is still very much alive in generations and generations of people who go through the cat flap until the XNUMXst century, leaving us shreds of youth in the process.
We started in 1968, perhaps too far away for some of us in terms of that point of subjectivity proper to history. But undoubtedly the aroma of Spanish dictatorship that delayed the advance of the country in various aspects, extended until well after the death of the dictator ...
Rufo Batalla is a young man who aspires to be a great journalist and in his first great opportunity he decides to put all the meat on the grill to earn that category. The plot soon awakens sympathy for this character, heir to the picaresque filled with the insurmountable stamp of ambitious youth.
In that sum of fortunate coincidences that only occasionally accompany those who seek luck, Rufo ends up establishing a friendship with a prince who entrusts him with the story of his life.
And so Rufo Batalla manages to escape the repressed Spain of the 60s and reaches something as antagonistic as New York.
Only, neither a place like the United States, free of authoritarian political suspicions, ends up being the idyllic place that the Spanish repressed could imagine.
In short, Eduardo Mendoza makes an interesting review of the problems here and there, in very disparate societies but which, after all, belong to the same time troubled by different circumstances. The point is that Eduardo Mendoza manages to string it all together with humor, with that brilliant creative capacity that mixes reality and touches of fantasy.
A work that was born with the intention of continuity in a trilogy that will be called The Three Laws of Movement and that augurs a wise and juicy review of fundamental moments of our most recent past, that second half of the XNUMXth century full of magic, fear and the necessary subjectivity of a genius like Mendoza.
You can now buy the book The King Receives, the new novel by Eduardo Mendoza, here:
Terrible book by my admired Eduardo Mendoza. A mess written with reluctance and with the intention of settling scores with his leftist youthful past. a convert