The Best Novels by Spanish Authors

To start, please could you say a bit about Spain’s novelistic tradition because I’m not familiar with it. What’s exciting about it, what do you like about it, why should other people be reading Spanish novels?

The first thing to say is that the book that many people claim is the first European novel, Don Quixote, was Spanish. So there is an argument that the whole genre stems from Spanish writing. We’ll talk about Don Quixote in more detail in a minute, but to my mind, it’s this perfect creation of a world. It’s beautifully written. It makes you think about the world in which you inhabit by presenting you with a picture of another one that you potentially don’t know. It’s a wonderful weaving of stories from different places and different times—and I suppose that’s what I want from a novel.

One of the things that you’ll see as we talk is that all the novels I’ve chosen are tomes. I wonder if this is something that comes from this quixotic heritage. The first one was this massive tome, everybody loved it, and so we can’t really hold ourselves back.

The novel in Spain has a checkered history. Don Quixote was published in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615, as the fame and fortune of the Spanish Empire was plummeting down. The Inquisition was becoming tighter and tighter, and there was less and less freedom of expression. From a golden age, Spain went into a relative cultural wilderness. There were a few sparks here and there, mainly in the visual arts. Goya happened. But not a lot happened in terms of Spanish writing because it was just so repressive for most of the 18th century. All the writing that started in the rest of Europe because of the Enlightenment never really happened in Spain.

Then, in the 19th century, there were some wonderful writers like Benito Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán. Pérez Galdós was hugely prolific. He was like Dickens, knocking them out. He wrote the Episodios Nacionales, 48 historical novels about Spain from Trafalgar up to the civil war in 1861. It was a fictionalized recounting of recent Spanish history and why it was a bit of a disaster. They’re all 250-300 pages long. I love Pérez Galdós. One or two of his novels are really amazing. Do they stand up next to Dickens or Zola or the Russians? Probably not, which is why they’re not massively in print and why I’m not suggesting them. But the point is there was a flowering of realist 19th-century novels. Then it slipped away again.

When modernism started to come about, Spain had the ‘generation of 1898’, which is when they lost Cuba and the last relics of empire. That’s when people like Gasset were writing, but it’s more philosophical, rather than in novel form. There was another literary ‘generation of 1927’, in which Lorca played a very big part. That was a wonderful flowering, but more of theater and poetry. The novel didn’t really happen.

Then you had Franco, and nobody was really writing because they were all sitting in the Nuevos Ministerios censoring books. That’s when Latin America took off. One of the contributing factors for the boom in Latin America was the fact that absolutely no publishing activity was happening in Spain. In a way, it took the Latin Americans to teach the Spaniards how to write novels again. It’s as if the Latin Americans went, ‘Okay, let’s go back to the tradition of the language that we write in, to Don Quixote, and let’s create these fabulous things.’ The wonderful Jorge Luis Borges, and his philosophical thoughts about writing and the nature of narration, was also important.

So Franco dies in 1974 and after that everything starts to bubble up. The novel starts to be reclaimed as an art form that Spaniards write. We’ll come on to talk about Javier Marías, who is seen as the great Spanish post-transition novelist. He mashes up the English novelistic tradition with the Spanish. Lots of his books are about Oxford, the Spanish department at the university, and being recruited to be a spy. It makes me laugh slightly because surely they were recruiting from the Russian department? But there was a flourishing in Spanish novels because you could write books again and they weren’t going to be censored.

So that’s an incredibly reductive account, but those are the broad outlines as I see them.

Thank you for that—because you’ve explained something I was curious about, which is why most novels I know in Spanish are by Latin American authors. The exception being Cervantes, of course. Let’s turn to that book first. You’ve already said a bit about how important Don Quixote is to Spain’s literary tradition. Could you maybe say a bit about Cervantes and why he wrote it? How did he come up with this crazy story?

Who knows? Because he was a genuine genius, this complete and utter one-off. The story of Cervantes is as insane as the story of Don Quixote. Again, it’s super-reductive to say that the book mirrors the life of the author. But the fact is that Cervantes was a soldier in the tercios in Flanders. He was captured by Barbary pirates and a galley slave for five years. Cervantes’s life was absolutely extraordinary and quite representative, I think, of the madness that was Spain at the beginning of the 17th century.

Spain was the first global empire. The country was united and suddenly had more money than anybody could imagine. They had the Catholic faith—and troublesome minorities who they treated badly and expelled in pogroms. Then the money started to trickle away because nobody was managing it properly…I think the insanity of Don Quixote comes from the insanity of the situation.

One of the things I love about Don Quixote is the constructed intertextuality of it. It’s meant to be a translation from the Arabic. The first part is the narrator saying, ‘I found this manuscript in the market in Toledo alongside all sorts of other things. It was written in Arabic by Benengeli’ (which means ‘aubergine’). At the time, everybody was trying to kill Moorish culture, but Don Quixote is a chronicle written purportedly by a Moor. This mixture of everything that was 17th-century Spain I just find completely fascinating.

Then you get to the Don himself: the fact that books make you mad, the perpetual, fruitless search. In Spanish literature you had the pícaro—a bad guy who is trying to con everybody. Sancho Panza has a bit of that. Don Quixote takes elements from the picaresque tradition, but he can’t even kid anyone. Shame and misfortune heap upon him because he exists in this totally parallel world of his own making.

But he really, really believes in it, and his moral compass is so strong…

I probably read Don Quixote when I was 21 or so, when I was studying 17th-century Spanish history. I can’t remember all the details, but I remember laughing and reading bits out loud to my dad because they were so funny. It’s very readable, isn’t it?

It’s very readable. The literary or philosophic aspects of it are completely hilarious and they fit with the narrative. It’s hilarious and poignant and all of those things. It takes you on this wonderful journey of the emotions. I understand why some people read it as a book about insanity or mental illness. I get it. I think it can be whatever you want it to be.

The other thing I love about Don Quixote is that while I did study Spanish and I’m married to somebody who grew up in Spain, I’m British and I find the way our two cultures blend really interesting. They are really quite different and stand quite in opposition to each other. Don Quixote was written at the same time as King Lear. England was on the up in literary and global terms. Those reflections of Shakespeare’s are incredibly expansive in every sense of the word—telling the tale in English for the world. While Spain was completely on the way down. Like Don Quixote, it was getting more provincial and going down its own rabbit hole…

But Don Quixote did enter the English language—expressions like ‘tilting at windmills.’

Yes, absolutely. Tilting at windmills, the man from La Mancha, quixotic. We have a real relationship with it. And it’s really inspired people. English literature has been massively influenced by Don Quixote.

Let’s fast forward a few centuries to your next book. This is Berta Isla (2017) by Javier Marias, who you mentioned as a post-transition writer. Tell me more.

Javier Marías only died in 2022. He is considered the great laureate of late 20th-, early 21st-century Spanish literature, particularly of the novel form. He’s written a lot. His books are quite difficult, but they are wonderful. I’ve picked Berta Isla because in it he is as human as he is philosophical, which he doesn’t always manage to do. It is really long.

It’s the story of a Spanish woman called Berta Isla, who, as a student during Franco’s dictatorship in the late 60s, early 70s, meets and falls in love with another student, a man called Tomás Nevinson. He’s half-English, half-Spanish—with a Spanish first name and an English last name.

Tomás goes off to Oxford and gets recruited to be a spy. All he wants to do is go back to Madrid, live with Berta and have a good life, but he’s trapped into becoming part of the British secret services and has to live a double life. It’s about a couple living this double life.

You see the character of Berta through the book. Initially, she finds it absolutely unbearable. She doesn’t understand why her husband has to go away and do all these things. He works on the Iranian embassy siege, he infiltrates a cell of the IRA, he works in the Falklands. He’s just not there and she finds this deeply, deeply hurtful. Then there comes a time when he simply doesn’t come back. And we find out later in the book that he’s lived this entire double life as a history teacher in Leicester. It’s extraordinary.

But Berta is just there in Madrid, waiting, not knowing. I love it because it feels real. We never know anybody. That’s slightly nihilistic of me, but life is this navigation of realizing that we have all these interactions with people, but what do we really know? Where are the boundaries of knowing and understanding and truth and lies and all of those big things? How are they enmeshed? And if you’re faced with this, as Berta Isla is, how do you navigate it? They know that they are meant to be together, they know that they are the loves of each other’s lives, but he’s just vanished, and he doesn’t live with her for 20 years, and then he comes back. And then what do you do?

So that’s the story. The spy thing is a massive metaphor. Lots of Javier Marías’s books are about the shadiness of human relations. For me, Berta Isla is the one that I like best because she’s a wonderful, wonderful character. I love her, her resignation, her fury—all of those things. Javier Marías just does it brilliantly.

Let’s go on to Patria (or Homeland) by Fernando Aramburu, which was published in 2016 and takes us to the Basque nationalist movement in northern Spain. What can you tell me about this one?

Patria has been the biggest hit in Spanish literature, with over a million copies sold. And it’s an 800-page book! The easy blurb is that this is the Spanish War and Peace. It’s set in a very small town in the Basque Country and it’s about ETA and the ETA period—ETA being the Basque separatist terrorist movement that ran a violent campaign between 1960 and the ceasefire in 2010 that prompts the narrative of Patria. It’s the story of two families who are both unhappy in their own way. And it’s about the relationship between them.

The book starts on the day the ceasefire is declared in 2011. The father of one family was murdered, we think by ETA, although we’re not sure. The police didn’t investigate. Because the father was assassinated, the family had to move out of their hometown and went to live in San Sebastián. But on the day of the ceasefire, the widow picks up her stuff and moves back to her flat in this small community. And everybody in the village is like, ‘How dare she move back?’ It’s out of that scenario that we get flashbacks as to what’s happened between these two families because of the conflict. It’s about how, when this terrible event happens, it messes up the kids of this family.

I think the parallels to Ireland are really interesting. There’s something universal about conflict, and especially an ideological conflict. Everybody is deeply ideological, but at the same time, they’re not quite sure why. They’re like, “I don’t quite know why I’m going to murder you, but I am going to murder you.” That’s writ very large in this book.

It sounds brilliant.

It’s really wonderful. It’s incredibly moving and very beautifully written. Class comes into it because the guy who gets murdered has his own factory. If you were earning money, there was a ‘revolutionary tax’ which meant giving a certain percentage of your income to ETA to show your support. The father refused, and that’s why he got murdered.

For anyone who doesn’t know much about ETA, is it easy to follow if you just pick up the book?

It is universal in terms of a conflict going on that is painted as ideological. ETA essentially started as an uprising against Franco as well as for Basque nationalism. When the transition happened, that became ideologically much more difficult to sustain. Lots of people thought, ‘Why can’t we all just get on?’—which is the attitude of the guy who gets murdered. From that point of view, the book is relatively easy to understand.

One of the things I didn’t realize was quite how brutal it was. Foundry Editions has just brought out a book, Spanish Beauty, that I translated, by Esther García Llovet. She told me her father had owned factories in Bilbao in the early 1970s, but he got car-bombed one night. They had to leave Bilbao the next morning, absolutely no questions asked, and settle in Madrid, which is where she grew up. When you’re not in a zone where internecine strife is going on, you pay attention when there’s a big attack, but you don’t really understand what it means to live there. That’s what Aramburu does amazingly well, showing what it was like.

Let’s go on to your fourth book, El corazón helado (2007) or The Frozen Heart by Almudena Grandes.

This is even more of a doorstopper than the others. Almudena is considered the great muse of Spanish women’s writers. She died in 2021. Rather tragically, Spain lost Javier Marias and Almudena Grandes within 12 months of each other. The weeping and gnashing of teeth at Almudena’s passing was enormous, because she really opened the way for portraying the last 70-80 years, from the dictatorship onwards, from a woman’s perspective.

She wrote a lot of books. They all tend to deal with the Spanish Civil War, so I’ve picked Almudena as the portrayer of the Civil War period and of the ‘two Spains,’ which is the expression people use to talk about it. The fact that she does it from a woman’s point of view gives it a depth and a warmth and a sensibility that might not be there in other authors. I could have picked Javier Cercas and Soldiers of Salamis and books like that. But I think Almudena gives the period a human feel that is just incredibly poignant.

El corazón helado starts with a funeral. It’s winter, it’s freezing cold and ghastly and the first line is: “The women weren’t wearing tights.” It’s this really evocative, totally simple sense of poverty and the reality of the situation. That’s what I love about this book. Almudena balances politics and the effect that politics has on the population incredibly well.

And what does the frozen heart of the title refer to? Who has a frozen heart?

Everybody has a frozen heart! It’s about communities and families being ripped apart. Your heart has to be frozen because suddenly you’re going to go and kill your brother because he’s on the other side. The frozen heart stands for the heart of Spain being ripped out.

The novel is long (1300 or so pages), but it’s a much easier read than Javier Marías, isn’t it? I saw the Guardian describe it as a ‘classy blockbuster.’

Yes, the sentences are much shorter than Javier Marías. It’s much less self-consciously literary.

That’s another important point about Spanish novels: they do high-low really, really well. I read a review of Berta Isla by Marcel Theroux, where he was arguing that it was a potboiler dressed up as literary theory. And I thought, ‘Yes? Isn’t that what novels are? I love a pot boiler!’ So you can have great tracts where the book is evoking the soul of Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges making you think about language, and then it’s like ‘oh, God, is she going to lose the baby in the park?’ I don’t think they necessarily need to stand in opposition to each other.

Theroux also argued that Berta Isla could have been written in a quarter of the number of pages. And I’m thinking, ‘Yes, it could, but that’s the Spanish thing, isn’t it?’ It’s like Spanish churches: they could be bare, but instead they go, ‘Let’s have another 4,300 cherubs over that window.’ It’s about embellishment.

OK, we’re at the last book you’ve chosen, Sabotaje olimpico (1993) or An Olympic Death, which is part of a series of detective novels by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

You may have noticed his last name bears a passing resemblance to a very famous Sicilian literary detective. Andrea Camilleri called his character Inspector Montalbano in homage to Vázquez Montalbán and his detective, Pepe Carvalho.

Pepe Carvalho is an amazing character, and why he’s not more in our public consciousness, I don’t know. He was the first of the great eccentric, philosopher, gourmand detectives. He is called Pepe Carvalho—with an h—to show that he comes from Galicia: his family are Galician immigrants into Barcelona. He is of the generation that moved from the countryside in the late 40s and 50s—the years of hunger, of the dictatorship—into the big cities to try and find work. The books are also paeans to Barcelona and how exciting it is as a city.

In the narrative, Pepe Carvalho is a committed communist. He worked for the Communist Party, but he also did some informing for the CIA on the side. There is a sense that Pepe Carvalho was playing the dictatorship.

Most of the books in the series start after the fall of the dictatorship and during the transition. They’re really fantastic books. Not only are they great detective stories, but they are fantastic books about this period. They are the books that, in a very approachable and noir-genre way, tell us about what the transition was like and the compromises that everybody had to make in moving from dictatorship to democracy. All the decisions: What do we talk about? What do we not talk about? What do we uncover? What do we not uncover? That’s a huge part of the Spanish cultural narrative and it continues to this day.

I picked Sabotaje olimpico deliberately because I graduated in 1992, and all of us were obsessed with the fact it was Spain’s year for the Olympics and shot off to Barcelona to volunteer. There was the famous slogan ‘Barcelona, posa’t guapa,’ which means ‘Barcelona get yourself smartened up.’ In the book, Pepe Carvalho is like, ‘God, I hate this. I’m going away.’ He’s about to leave town for his shack in the country to cook lots of dishes from his Escoffier cookbook when he gets called by the IOC to come and investigate, because there have been some threats…

But the background is that Barcelona is making itself smart for a global bun fight. Neighborhoods are being knocked down and people are being rehoused. Are the fundamental structures of the city being ripped apart, or is it for the best? In a sense, Barcelona 92 was the first gentrification story. Looking back now, when over-tourism in Barcelona is the huge story, I think it’s very interesting to see how it was right at the beginning. [SPOILER ALERT] And the bad guys turn out to be not international terrorists, but the City Council, the IOC and a guy called Mariscal. The graphics for the Olympics were all done by Javier Mariscal and his agency in Barcelona. It’s the best branding job that anybody’s ever done, but in the book, they’re the baddies.

I just love this book. Pepe Carvalho is a great character. We should have more of Pepe Carvalho in this country. Also, as a story of Barcelona, of the beginning of something that is still very, very relevant, it’s a good one. And who doesn’t like a detective story set at the Olympics?

So is this the kind of book that Foundry Editions, which you founded, will now be translating?

We’re currently translating contemporary fiction. We haven’t navigated the estates of authors yet. We’re only a year and a half, two years old. We’re really new. We’re publishing two books from Spain, both by women authors. One is about the housing and construction boom and crash, and how that played out for Spaniards—rather than how we normally hear about it, which is what it meant for British investors on the Costa del Sol. The other book is about Benidorm, which is the absolute pinnacle of what goes wrong—or right, depending on your point of view—with late-stage capitalism mass tourism. They’re both fascinating novels.

So is the reason you’re doing this because you felt not enough Spanish novels are translated into English?

Yes. It started with Javier Marías. I was at one of those dinner parties that all of us of a certain type go to in London and I’d just read Berta Isla. Everybody around that table—many of whom had been to very grand universities—were talking about how amazing Tessa Hadley was. And I’m like, ‘Yes, but have any of you ever read Javier Marías?’ And they were like, ‘What? Who is that?’ and carried on talking about Tessa Hadley. And I’m like, ‘Seriously? Come on, everyone! Let’s try and read a book that 50,000 Spaniards have read. It might be instructive in some way to think outside the Anglosphere.’ So that’s how it all started.

And you’re translating some of them yourself?

I translated the one called Spanish Beauty. I actually had no intention of becoming a publisher. I thought I was going to become a translator, so I went to UEA and did their MA in literary translation. In the course of doing that, I realized that being a publisher might be a better way to achieve my mission—if that doesn’t sound too vainglorious—of drawing attention to really good stories that give different perspectives. Having spoken to lots of people in the industry, who said, ‘Oh, go on, give it a go!’ I went and did it. Now it’s a thing, and I don’t know what to do with myself, but there we are.

Novels are a great way to learn about the history of a country as well—I know from Five Books that a lot of people are interested in the Spanish Civil War, for example.

It’s an invaluable way of learning about it. It’s a hugely inspirational way to get under the skin of it. That’s what’s so amazing about Almudena Grandes, for instance. She’s writing about the Civil War and the way that it affects ordinary people in their everyday lives. Fernando Aramburu is the same. How does what’s happening affect me as a human being at home, with my family? What do I do about my relationship with my brother, who thinks completely, fundamentally differently to me—to the extent that we’re going to go and kill, not necessarily each other, but people who think in the same way? It’s fascinating.