Volverás a Región clearly represents … a significant departure from the neorealistic novel of the 1950's and early 1960's. It exhibits several characteristics which, when analyzed in depth, exemplify an innovative approach to the novel in Spain. (p. 43) What has traditionally been called the "plot" of a novel does not exist in Volverás a Región. Instead, the novel consists of a complex framework of third person narration and pseudodialogues betw...

Benet's six novelettes are chronologically scattered throughout his entire career: from his first and seminal four-work collection, Nunca llegarás a nada [You Will Never Get Anywhere], dating back to the 1950s, up to his latest legend, "Numa," published in 1978 as part of Del pozo y del Numa (un ensayo y una leyenda) [Of the Well and Numa (an essay and a legend)]. In between, two important pieces were published: Una tumba [A Tomb] in 1971 and "Sub Rosa" in 1973, the...

Juan Benet has been called the Spanish Proust. He is one of Spain's most important and controversial modernists. His style, strongly influenced by Central and South American writers, has in turn influenced the post-Franco generation. A Meditation is the second novel in a trilogy and the first to be translated into English…. It contains echoes of Faulkner and Hardy, as well as the clear footprints of Mr. Proust. It is crammed with references to Plato, Nietzsche, Kafka, Rilke, Schopenhauer, and ...

[Juan Benet, in his novel Saúl ante Samuel,] repeats his standard themes of ruin, disintegration, solitude, guilt, time, life, and death involving the Spanish Civil War and his mythical Región. In the author's examination of the State, revenge, and avarice as exemplified by the various characters, he seems to conclude that no answers exist for their multiple human motivations and concomitant problems. The author deliberately obfuscates the slowly developing plot. The novel opens in an a...

Juan Benet is sometimes called the Proust of Spain, sometimes the Faulkner. Neither label is correct. He is best described as the Juan Benet of Spain, the most imposing, challenging and radically intransigent novelist writing in Spanish (or perhaps in any language) today. "A Meditation" may be the most demanding novel I've ever read….

Using the style and tone of traditional fables, Juan Benet turns the formula into a contemporary art form to serve his own artistic and ideological purposes [in Trece fábulas y media]. While some of the short tales end with morals concerning traditional concepts of destiny and death—i.e., each man's destiny is his alone and man voluntarily or involuntarily seeks his own death—others end with reversals of traditional ideas or with no moral at all…. [One of the fables, for e...