SOURCE: Speck, Paula K. “The Making of a Novel in Unamuno.” South Atlantic Review 47, no. 4 (November 1982): 52-63.

In the following essay, Speck argues that Como se hace una novella is a series of metanarratives constructed like a maze of mirrors in a carnival, suggesting that the novel tells the story of Unamuno's search for this narrative “way out” of the labyrinth of reflection.

Como se hace una novela (1927), one of Miguel de Unamuno's last novels, contains his most extreme experiments with narrative form. In it, he set out to push to their farthest limit the explorations of the autonomous character, the self-reflecting narrative, and the fiction-within-a-fiction which he began in Niebla and other works.¹ Yet this highly avant-garde novel is also one of Unamuno's most political works: he wrote it to protest the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, who had driven him to imprisonment and then to self-imposed...