Exactly 50 years ago, in May 1975, a young Eduardo Mendoza published his first novel: The Truth about the Savolta Case. It was the book of the year, released a few months before Franco's death, and soon became a symbol of the Transition. Immediately, critics hailed the 32-year-old writer as "the renovator of Spanish narrative" in a Spain eager for novelties and freedoms. This morning, half a century after his debut, Eduardo Mendoza was honored with the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature.
In these five decades of his career, the writer has earned the label of "innovator". In that monumental novel of over 400 pages, the Mendoza style was already present: an unapologetic blend of genres, between the historical (set in the tumultuous Barcelona of 1917-1919), the noir, and a satire reminiscent of traditional picaresque. The president of the Princess of Asturias jury, Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the Royal Spanish Academy, highlighted his "decisive contribution to Spanish-language literature in the last half-century with a series of novels that combine the will for innovation with the ability to reach a very broad audience."
This broad audience would come with his second novel. The young writer, somewhat overwhelmed by the unexpected success of his first book, would later publish one of the greatest amusements of national literature, the hilarious The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt (1978), starring a pseudo-detective (he loves pseudo-detectives) who has just escaped from a mental institution. And this is when Mendoza begins to achieve the most difficult: the unconditional affection of readers for his tender and mischievous humor, a modern Lazarillo de Tormes. Something he would push to the extreme in No Word from Gurb (1991), the adventures of a lost extraterrestrial in pre-Olympic Barcelona.
In the jury's report, Mendoza is described as "a provider of happiness for readers", as his work "merits reaching all generations, who today recognize themselves in his luminous pages."
Gurb became one of his greatest successes, in sales and with the public. There is no age limit to read it, and it is the least obligatory reading in schools, which have had it on the Secondary curriculum for years, especially in Catalonia.
If humor is one of Mendoza's trademarks, his hometown, Barcelona, stands out as his grand stage. He even coined one of the most beautiful epithets for it, taken from another of his mythical titles: The City of Marvels (1986), an addictive historical chronicle - and about class struggle - spanning from the Universal Exhibition of 1888 to the International Exhibition of 1929. Not only did it earn him the City of Barcelona Award, but also several international awards, especially in France and Italy.
Mendoza's identification with Barcelona is such that, in 2020, when he received the International Barcino Award for Historical Novel, the jury went as far as to claim that "to say Barcelona is to say Mendoza."
The Boy Who Liked Pirates
As a child, Mendoza showed signs of becoming a writer. Born in the Gràcia neighborhood in the midst of the post-war period in 1943, into a cultured family with books at his disposal. He quickly devoured classic adventure novels: Julio Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Emilio Salgari... There is something of that adventurous epic in his books, where he has managed to sneak in disguised pirate micro-novels: he adored Sandokan. He also turned his Catholic heritage at the Marists into literature (see the somewhat mischievous essay The Prophet's Beard, 2020).
In 1960, like any well-bred boy and more out of pressure than vocation, he entered the University of Barcelona to study Law. He would never practice as a lawyer. After graduating, he chose to travel with a scholarship to London, another of his favorite cities. Although he only spent a year in the British capital, he never truly left (in fact, he has been living between Barcelona and London for some time now).
Mendoza has always had manners of an English gentleman, with his classic elegance and subtle irony. Added to this is his exemplary cosmopolitanism, also forged in New York, where he lived in the 1970s, working as an interpreter for the UN. In fact, he is one of the few remaining representatives of that cosmopolitan Barcelona, so trendy in the 90s, even though the concept has been forgotten today.
Precisely because of his moderate stance, far from radicalism, Mendoza has been the target of criticism from Catalan separatists for his equidistance with the procès and insightful essays like What's Happening in Catalonia? (2017).
At 82 years old, the writer has won the most important awards in the country, from the Planeta Prize for Cat Fight (2010) to the Cervantes Prize in 2016. He was also the first Spaniard to win the prestigious Kafka Prize in the Czech Republic in 2015. Now he adds the Princess of Asturias Award for his immense chronicle of modern Spain, from the Transition to today, from modernist Barcelona to mass tourism Barcelona. And always bringing a smile to the reader.