There was a time when being a writer seemed to require a certain aesthetic, an eccentric attitude, a kind of youthful rebellion maintained and extended into adulthood. Remembering the last representatives of this role of the writer in Spain leads us to Camilo José Cela y Francis Threshold. In fact, as good friends and to a certain extent, the second heir to the first, this imprint of shared public attitude is perfectly understood.
For the layman, Umbral will go down in history as the impertinent who blurted out the "I've come to talk about my book" in the middle of a prime-time television program.
But the truth is that in the current television situation in which writers and thinkers have been replaced by pink chroniclers, by fatuous and insolent characters from the most complete emptiness, it makes one think that Umbral was right to anger because there, in that program, there was no talk of his book ...
Beyond the anecdote that survives the character, Don Francisco Umbral cultivated a kind of revising narrative of manners. Realism punctuated by the popular Spanish imagination, by moral and political references and with a transforming intention, shamelessly nuanced by the author's perspective. A vision of who we are with a critical and scathing point, with an aesthetic refinement that balances the sordid, the critical, the sarcastic. A mix that earned him wide recognition as a columnist and that also resulted in great literary successes.
Top 3 recommended novels by Francisco Umbral
Nymphs
No one better than the mature writer to approach the lost paradise of childhood, or more precisely the transition, to that exit from the larval stage of our own life in which we end up abandoning the skin of childhood. Adolescence is magic and disappointment, the gaze of a child and the desires of an adult.
In this novel we discover the writer capable of pouring, with his exquisite yet profound language, a whole cascade of emotions and sensations about what was lost, with that melancholic perspective towards the discovery of carnal desire, in a time in which a simple summer night can peer into eternity.
A whole retrospective at the beginning of life's journey in that loneliness that is maturity, but infused at the same time with humor and reconciliation with the young man that to a greater or lesser extent we all were.
Letter to my wife
Since 1959, Umbral shared her life with María España. Together they suffered the deepest grief of loss when their son passed away at the age of five in 1968.
From that idea of coexistence that was finally able to weather the storm of contradictory emotions, Francisco Umbral wrote this book that was only published posthumously and that, above all, praised Mary, elevated her to that category of the fundamental, the most high level that can be granted to a love that has lasted for so many years.
The prose at times harsh and exquisitely brilliant in its lyrical spikes, turns this book into a vital novel, a beacon for any couple looking for answers or sustenance for coexistence.
The Giocondo
Passionate about Madrid and the intrahistory written by poets, bohemians and nocturnal chroniclers, Francisco Umbral offers in this novel a phantasmagorical cosmos of the Madrid that was. Pieces of old nights in which the last bars and other places where the freedom of the most forbidden slipped and ends up showing itself splendidly in that kind of decadence of the disowned.
Si Inclán Valley offered us the grotesque, Threshold traces in this novel a postmodern review of the concept. It is no longer about the deformation of classical values but about their perversion. Among typical places of Madrid that no longer exists, we meet Giocondo and a host of characters from the moral underworld of a not so distant past, characters who live yearning for their moment to show themselves as they were, heroes of nocturnal love.
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