And so for over two decades a European people, one of the initiators of municipal and representative institutions in Europe, has been kept in jail by one man leaning on an Army corrupted by fat directorships. This state of affairs is fundamentally the fault of the Spanish people themselves, and no objective study can or should blur that fact.
Salvador de Madariaga, The New Republic, August 27, 1962
The phenomenon bears brooding about. Spanish art and literature have always had a touch of the demonic, the lavish, and the unhinged—as if life had always been rather too much for the individual Spaniard. For many of us, Goya supplies the visual synthesis of the literature. As curious and inexplicable as tauromachy and quixotism, the Spanish flavor from Lope to Lorca has always been fairly distinct: not South American, nor Mexican, far from the Italian and the French. I mention these things because we tend to take them loosely for granted; and in doing so we probably miss what is special to modern Spain in the modern Spanish novel.
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