Juan Benet

Juan Benet Goitia (born October 7, 1927 in Madrid , † January 5, 1993 in Madrid) was a Spanish writer and engineer who belonged to the generation of social realism who came to the breakthrough in the 1950s, but was an outsider in it . Although he dealt with the immediate history of Spain - civil war , with realists such as Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio , Carmen Martín Gaite , Ignacio Aldecoa or the Goytisolo brothers, Juan and LuisFranco dictatorship - both his style and his understanding of literature as well as his role models ( Faulkner , Conrad , Proust , Beckett , Kafka ) were fundamentally different. He was also late, while his generation comrades began to publish around 1955, his first novel Volverás a Región came out in 1968. With him Benet initiated the renewal of the Spanish literature of the outgoing dictatorship and the emerging democracy.

Life

Studies, first job, literary beginnings (1940–1965)

Juan Benet was born into a middle-class, conservative family. His father Tomás Benet was a lawyer, his mother Teresa Goitia had Basque roots. He was the youngest of three children. When the civil war broke out in 1936, the father was murdered by anarchist militiamen, after which the family fled to San Sebastián , which was in the hands of the insurgent military, and did not return to Madrid until the end of the war in 1939. There Benet went to the strictly Catholic private school Colegio del Pilar , where he graduated from high school. He then studied at the Madrid Technical University ( Escuela de Ingenieros de Caminos ). In his memory book Otoño en Madrid , Benet describes these years of study in Madrid in the gray post-war period, his visits to the old novelist Pío Baroja , who, along with Cervantes, is one of Benet's Spanish models, his friendship with the medical student and later novelist Luis Martín-Santos , his forays through the Madrid cafes.

In 1949 he traveled abroad for the first time, to Paris , where his brother Francisco ("Paco") had fled the wasteland of Spanish political and cultural life on a French scholarship. The older brother, with his opposition to the Franco regime, which finally led him into exile, was groundbreaking for the younger one. From him he also received the first books by Sartre , Malraux and Camus , the first numbers by Temps moderne . A second trip abroad took place in 1953 to Finland, where the budding engineer worked as a student trainee at the municipal power station in Helsinki for a summer. The experiences of these two trips to Europe in the early 1950s were reflected in a first volume of short stories, which was self-published in 1961 with the title Nunca llegarás a nada and which was completely overlooked by critics and the public, although it was “the first book of the greatest literary book Post-war talent, ”as Félix de Azúa claims. Benet created these stories from 1958 to 1959 in Oviedo ( Asturias ), where he, meanwhile married to Nuria Jordana, worked on the construction of the railway between Lugo de Llanera and Villabona. At that time, in the solitude after work in the wilderness, writing and reading were his only pastimes. From 1961 to 1965, Benet worked as an engineer in the northern province of León , where he worked on a large dam in the valley of the Porma River. “The place was in the Cantabrian mountain range, 1100 m above sea level, surrounded by forests, bears, wild boars, wolves and snow,” Benet later wrote. It was there that he wrote his first novel Volverás a Región .

Writer and engineer (1966–1993)

In 1966 Benet moved to Madrid with his family. In the previous years he had occasionally intervened in the literary scene with articles and essays in magazines such as Cuadernos para el diálogo and Revista de Occidente . When it appeared in 1965, his volume of essays La inspiración y el estilo triggered a veritable realism debate through its indirect but sharp criticism of the prevailing, one-sidedly realistic understanding of literature. Perhaps that explains why Benet's novel Volverás a Región , which he presented for the Nadal , the most important literary prize in Spain at the time, did not even make it into the top 20 finalists. Nonetheless, when it was published in December 1967, the book caught the attention of some connoisseurs, including Carlos Barral , who ran the progressive publishing house Seix Barral in Barcelona. Barral, who dared to publish relevant authors of European modernism and young oppositional Spanish authors despite the vigilant censorship, brought Benet into his publishing house. In 1969 he received the highly coveted Biblioteca Breve Prize for his second novel Una meditación . His literary career had started. “Perhaps I am exaggerating when I say that Seix Barral in Barcelona in the late 60s was something similar to the studios of Metro or Paramount in Los Angeles in the inventive years of film… It is not difficult to understand that who is this world through the big door entered - and the Biblioteca Breve Prize was such a door - felt a turn in his life towards a more cosmopolitan, casual, with a little luck and talent also more prosperous and possibly more elegant course ”.

In the 1970s, with his regularly published novels - Un viaje de invierno (1972), La otra casa de Mazón (1973), En el Estado (1977) - his stimulating essay volumes and articles , Benet became a public figure and a model for the younger generation Literati. After the dictator's death in 1975, he came to the fore even more through his articles in the liberal daily El País , in which he commented on current political and cultural issues. With the publication of the novel El aire de un crimen (1980), which earned him the popular Planeta Prize, Benet reached a broad readership for the first time. After the tragic death of his wife (1974), he traveled around the world. To China (1976), to the USA to give lectures (1980) or to teach during a semester at Columbia University in New York (1982). His many years of preoccupation with the subject of the Spanish Civil War culminated in the monumental, multi-volume novel Herrumbrosas lanzas , which was published in 1983 and 1985/86 and was awarded the Premio de la Crítica . As a counterbalance to this, the small commemorative volume Otoño en Madrid 1950 (1987) can be considered, in which Benet, an admirer of the Englishman Laurence Sterne , undertook a “sensitive journey” into the years of his youth in the post-war Madrid period. The writer Manuel Vicent wrote about it: "His most-read book, a truly literary jewel ..., is a milieu picture of the time in which Benet took his self-confident talent for a walk in the world of Galdós , which he so despised ". In 1985 Benet married the Spanish poet Blanca Andreu in New York. In the early 1990s, La construcción de la torre de Babel , a collection of essays, and El caballero de Sajonia , an idiosyncratic interpretation of Luther, appeared . Juan Benet died unexpectedly on January 5, 1993 after a brief illness. He worked on a new version of his 1980 work Saúl ante Samuel .

Works

Novels

• Nunca llegarás a nada (1961)
• Volverás a Región (1967)
• Una meditación (1970)
• Un viaje de invierno (1972)
• La otra casa de Mazón (1973)
• En el Estado (1977)
• El aire de un crimen (1980)
• Saúl ante Samuel (1980)
• Herrumbrosas lanzas, I - IV (1983)
• Herrumbrosas lanzas, VII (1985)
• Herrumbrosas lanzas, VIII - XII (1986)
• En la penumbra (1989)
• El caballero de Sajonia (1991)

stories

• Una tumba (1971)
• 5 narraciones y 2 fábulas (1972)
• Sub pink (1973)
• Cuentos completos 2 vol. (1977)
• Trece fábulas y media (1981)

Essays, memoirs, articles

• La inspiración y el estilo (1965)
• Puerta de tierra (1970)
• El ángel del Señor abandona a Tobías (1976)
• En ciernes (1976)
• ¿Qué fue la Guerra Civil? (1976)
• Del pozo y el Numa (1978)
• La moviola de Eurípides (1982)
• Artículos 1962-1977 (1983)
• Otoño en Madrid 1950 (1987)
• The construction of the torre de Babel (1990)
• Cartografía personal (1997)
• Páginas impares (1996)
• La sombra de la guerra. Escritos sobre la Guerra Civil española (1999)
• Una biografía literaria (2007)
• Infidelidad del regreso (2007)

Translations into German

• A tomb / Numa (1989)
• Rusty Lances I - IV (1991)
• Penumbra (1991)
• You Will Get Nothing (1992)
• The Tower of Babel (1994)

Web links

• Literature by and about Juan Benet in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin
• Literature by and about Juan Benet in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Juan Benet in the catalog of the library of the Instituto Cervantes in Germany

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Juan Benet: Una biografía literaria. cuatro ediciones, Madrid 2007
2. ^ Diccionario de la literatura española e hispanoamericana. Vol. I, Alianza, Madrid 1993 pp. 166-167
3. ^ Juan Benet: Otoño en Madrid. Alianza, Madrid 1987
4. ^ Benet, "Otoño," p. 17
5. ↑ Benet: Otoño. P. 18
6. ↑ Benet: Otoño. Pp. 100-108
7. ↑ Félix de Azúa: Prologue to: Juan Benet: Nunca llegarás a nada. Debate, Madrid 1990 p
8. ↑ Benet: Una biografía literaria. P. 9
9. ^ Juan Benet: Prologue in Volverás a Región. Alianza, Madrid 1974, p. 11
10. ↑ Juan Benet: El efecto Barral. in Revista de Occidente. No. from July-August 1990 p. 14
11. ↑ Juan Benet: Cronología. in Cartografía personal. Edited by Mauricio Jalón, Centro ediciones, Valladolid 1997
12. ↑ Manuel Vicent: Juan Benet: en un tiempo de silencio. in El País. May 30, 2099
13. ↑ James Kirkup: Obituary: Juan Benet. in The Independent. London 8th January 1993