Spanish · 1927–2019
Ferlosio was the son of a Falangist minister and became one of the most corrosive essayists in Spain, which he regarded as the same story told twice. He published a picaresque fantasy at twenty-four, then in 1955 El Jarama, a novel in which a group of young Madrileños spend a Sunday by a river and one of them drowns, written almost entirely in overheard dialogue. It won the Nadal, defined Spanish social realism, and he then abandoned fiction for fifteen years to study grammar and write about syntax. What he produced afterwards was essays: on war, on sport, on advertising, on the language of politics, argued at a level of logical severity that made him unquotable and unanswerable. He won the Cervantes Prize in 2004 and spent the ceremony explaining why prizes are suspect.