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