Spanish · 1866–1936
Valle-Inclán was a Galician with a waist-length beard who lost his left arm after a café argument turned into a fight with a cane, and who cultivated a public persona so extravagant that Madrid could not decide whether he was a genius or a crank. He wrote decadent, perfumed prose in his thirties and then destroyed his own manner, inventing the esperpento: a form that holds Spanish reality up to a concave mirror because, he said, the tragic sense of Spanish life can only be rendered by systematic deformation. Bohemian Lights follows a blind poet's last night through Madrid; Tirano Banderas invented the Latin American dictator novel two decades before Asturias. He directed the Spanish Academy in Rome briefly under the Republic, quarrelled with everyone, and died in Santiago de Compostela in January 1936, six months before the war.