Gonzalo Suárez is being presented anew as a pioneering figure in Spanish literature and cinema, with Javier Cercas arguing that the writer and filmmaker was the country’s first truly postmodern author. The claim appears in an unpublished prologue by Cercas to a revised edition of his study of Suárez, which Taurus is due to publish in November. The material was published by El País, which presented the text as a reassessment of a work that began as Cercas’s doctoral thesis in 1991.
Cercas recalls discovering Suárez in early 1989, when he was in his twenties and working as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He was searching for another book in the university library when he came across Trece veces trece. Shortly beforehand, his friend and first editor, Jordi Cornudella, had written to ask whether he had read Suárez, whose books had been out of print for some time. Cercas says the encounter transformed his understanding of his own literary formation. He decided that Suárez was his missing Spanish literary father and that he should write his doctoral thesis about him.
For Cercas, the discovery served two purposes. The first was practical: he needed a doctoral thesis to earn a living. The second was literary: he wanted to construct a personal tradition and genealogy in which he could locate himself as a writer. He had already identified Spanish predecessors in the Middle Ages and the Golden Age, as well as literary influences from Latin America, the United States and Europe. What he lacked, he says, was a Spanish father. He therefore made Suárez that figure.
Two years after discovering Suárez, Cercas completed his thesis, and two years later he published a book derived from it. Both carried the title La obra literaria de Gonzalo Suárez. Cercas now acknowledges that both versions were burdened by the requirements of academic writing and were, in his view, largely inaccessible to ordinary readers. The forthcoming edition has been reconstructed by Xisca Mas from the substantial material contained in the earlier works. Cercas says he has made only minor corrections while deliberately preserving the youthful work’s “ingenuities, snobberies, simplifications and clumsiness”, alongside its “drive, energy and enthusiasm”.
The revised version makes explicit an argument that Cercas says was already present throughout his original study: Suárez repeatedly arrived ahead of his contemporaries and therefore remained isolated. Cercas cites Juan José Millás’s later formulation that Suárez “has always arrived first everywhere and always left first, so he has always been alone”.
The central case made by Cercas rests on the breadth and timing of Suárez’s experiments. In the 1960s, he writes, Suárez was an outsider in Spain who rejected the dominant realism and produced forms of writing that were unusual at the time but later became increasingly familiar. He wrote fantastic literature when few Spanish writers were doing so, crime fiction when the genre was regarded as reactionary or childish, and metaliterary fiction before the term had become established. He also experimented with pop narrative and what Cercas describes as new journalism before American practitioners had given that form its name.
Cercas argues that Suárez’s willingness to combine apparently incompatible cultural references was itself characteristic of the work. The writer could place the names of Alfredo Di Stéfano and James Joyce in the same sentence, joining popular and high culture in ways that were then unconventional. His innovations were not confined to literature. Cercas contends that Suárez’s cinema was similarly ahead of its time, arguing that work he made in the late 1960s anticipated approaches that Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodóvar would employ decades later.
From these examples, Cercas develops his broader classification of Suárez. If Spanish literary postmodernism can be understood as having distant roots in the second part of Don Quixote and a more immediate predecessor in Jorge Luis Borges, whom he calls “father of us all”, then Suárez, he argues, was Spain’s first postmodern writer.
Yet Cercas also acknowledges that Suárez has never occupied a corresponding position in Spain’s literary canon. Part of the explanation, he says, lies with Suárez himself, who consistently refused to seek a place within any canon. But Cercas also accepts responsibility. His original doctoral thesis, he concedes, was required to be a work of scholarship but failed, in his assessment, to become a proper book. The new edition is partly an attempt to correct that failure.
The revised study covers Suárez’s literary and cinematic work only up to 1991. Cercas nevertheless argues that his later work, however meritorious, does not invalidate the central argument of the study. In his view, Spanish literary history of the past century contains a gap corresponding to Suárez, and he hopes the new book will help fill it.
