Spanish · 1927–1993
Benet was a civil engineer who spent years building dams in León and Asturias — the Porma reservoir was his — and wrote his novels in the evenings in construction camps. His father had been shot by anarchists in Madrid in 1936. He read Faulkner and decided Spanish social realism was a provincial embarrassment, and in 1967 published Volverás a Región, a novel in enormous coiling sentences about an invented region of northern Spain that nobody can enter or leave. It sold poorly and changed everything: the writers who followed, from Marías to Muñoz Molina, treat him as the point where the Spanish novel became modern again. Marías was his protégé and has written about the Saturday gatherings at Benet's house. He wrote essays on ruins, on Rommel, on the shape of the Spanish landscape, and never stopped building dams.