El mundo. (The World)

Reviewed by Bruce Jensen, South Texas Coll. Lib., McAllen, TX -- Críticas, 1/15/2008

Millás, Juan José.
Spain/U.S.: Planeta. 2007. 233p. ISBN 978-84-08-07754-1. pap. $17.95. FICTION

Winner of the 2007 Planeta prize for the novel—the most lucrative award in Spanish-language letters, worth nearly $900,000—this novel is a partially fictionalized memoir rooted in the run-down Madrid barrio of Millás’s youth. Incidents remembered from his early childhood spiral gradually into related stories from other epochs of the writer’s life. Anchoring the book are its unfailing points of reference: the boy’s quirky neighborhood and his sometimes unconventional household. The writer’s sure voice ties together odd episodes as he moves back and forth in time: his frustrating crush on a friend’s boy’s older sister, for example, is revisited years later in an American hotel room when the narrator is a published novelist and she an aspiring literary scholar; his odd relationship with their father, a supposed Interpol agent, is painted from a child’s innocent perspective. This is an entertaining read with some laugh-out-loud passages, but it gently invites the reader to wrestle with complex issues of identity. Millás published his first novel in 1975, the year of Franco’s demise, and his works immediately earned the continued appreciation of academic critics on both sides of the Atlantic (notoriety that merits an ironic mention in these pages) along with several literary prizes. In the United States, the first 25 years of his oeuvre is shelved mainly in academic libraries, but this year’s award is apt to accelerate the attention Millás has recently begun to receive worldwide. Readers will find the comic sensibility and eye for absurdity that shape Millás’s journalism: El mundo is a place where the factual and the fantastic melt into one another. Recommended for all libraries and bookstores.