Una comedia ligera.
Gerling, David Ross
As indicated by the editors on the cover of this work, Una comedia
ligera is a novel. Specifically, it is a novel with an interpolated play
whose segments appear sporadically throughout the novel from beginning
to end. Moreover, the "light drama" or comedia ligera referred
to by the title applies just as well to the novel itself as to the play,
considering the light, entertaining nature of the book. Nevertheless, as
with Eduardo Mendoza's other novels (see e.g. WLT 66:3, p. 487),
the unsophisticated plot exhibits some extraordinary writing.
Mendoza uses the age-old device of inserting an obviously creative
work into the main work so as to endow the latter with the appearance of
truth. The stratagem works so well here that it really feels that life,
as portrayed by the novel, copies art, represented by the play, or vice
versa for that matter. Although the play is much too sketchy to merit
its own review, the novel, conversely, reads beautifully and captivates
with its polymorphic style.
The events narrated occur in the Barcelona/Costa Brava area of the
1950s and recount the misadventures of a playwright, Carlos Prullas,
author of the interpolated play. Carlos must contend with both his
implication in a murder and his midlife crisis, the latter immensely
more entertaining than the former, even though the two are inextricably entwined. So when Carlos invites the young, aspiring actress Lili to a
cheap hotel for an afternoon of extramarital sex, he has no idea that
this seemingly harmless adventure will later almost cost him his life.
The setting for this part of the story is Barcelona's seamy underbelly known as the Barrio Chino, where, as Henry Miller would say,
there was "sex running through the streets like sewers."
Ironically, this squalor gives rise to some of the novel's most
fortuitous writing. Mendoza's description of the markets, the
streets that twist and turn like rabbit warrens, and the low-life
inhabitants produces a visual feast worthy of comparison to Zola's
Ventre de Paris. Not all is pure description, however. Mendoza also
knows how to excite us with a lyrical violence that we would expect to
find only in a Raymond Chandler "hard-boiler" taken from the
pages of the now-defunct pulp magazines Black Mask and Dime Detective.
When Carlos returns to his lovely wife Martita and their two children
who are spending their long summer holiday by the sea, Mendoza's
style reflects this change of setting accordingly. Zola and Chandler
give way to F. Scott Fitzgerald as we watch Carlos float from cocktail
party to cocktail party and spend time on the beach with his children
while trying simultaneously to seduce Marichuli Mercadal, an updated
version of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Clarin's Ana Ozores. By
story's end, summer is giving way to autumn as a much wiser but
emotionally and physically bruised Carlos comes to terms with his
burnout as a playwright and his entry into midlife. The engaging manner
in which Mendoza registers this parallel is every bit as painfully
nostalgic and emotionally satisfying as the voice-over for the closing
scene of the film version of The Great Gatsby.
David Ross Gerling Sam Houston State University