Who are we? 55 books of the 20th century Spanish literature

Who are we? 55 books of the 20th century Spanish literature

Essay
Editorial Periferica, 2021
192 pages

If literature is one of the tools that society uses to create its identity, a mirror where to look and recognize oneself, this proposal is born from an attempt to know which would be the answer from the literature to question of who we are.

Critic and publisher, Constantino Bértolo, unfolds in this work his large experience, his deep knowledge of Spanish letters and his steely capacity of analysis to offer a journey in historic-critic code of the literature created in the 20th century, now that enough time has passed to look back at it, through a selection of fifty five works of Spanish writers, written in Spanish, accompanied by a short, lucid and accurate commentary. From Azorín and Ramón J. Sender to Olvido García Valdés and Luis Magrinyà, going through Luisa Carnés, María Zambrano, Juan Eduardo Zúñiga or Rafael Chirbes can be heard in these pages.

From the rural world to the proletariat and the revolution, from the Civil War and the postwar to anti Franco resistance, going trough feminism, the power of the church, Europe as a destiny or the culture of the Transition, the book proposes a dialectic conversation, complicit or critic, between literature and history: literature as ecography of the history. The history of a century in the life of Spain: a different reading guide, agile and resounding, a map against forgetfulness in times of overwhelming speed.