Eduardo Mendoza's Barcelona

Abstract

The criticism on Eduardo Mendoza that focuses on the role of Barcelona in his works mostly considers the city solely as an important backdrop for the action of the novels or in some cases a protagonist in a given work. There is not any comprehensive analysis of Mendoza's vision of the Barcelona throughout the trajectory of his novels, and the studies that do focus on the city in one or two of his works generally lack a viable urban theoretical basis. The object of my study is to reassess Mendoza's work by focusing on how it emerges from the process of the urbanization of consciousness described by the geographer and urbanist David Harvey, and how its role relates to the politics of space and place in late 20th-century Barcelona. Not only does this approach facilitate a greater understanding of the texts, but also examining the novels in this light provides a greater understanding of Barcelona. Chapter I elaborates on the urban theories of Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and others that detail the urbanization of capital, the urbanization of consciousness and the role of space and place in the urban process under capitalism. In the second chapter I look at Barcelona as a concrete example of the urban process and place construction from the implementation of the Plan Cerda to the post-Olympic era. Chapter III looks at La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (1975) and La ciudad de los prodigios (1989) as examples of an urbanized consciousness anticipating significant transformations; La verdad facing the end of the Francoist dictatorship, and La ciudad preparing for the 1992 Olympics. The fourth Chapter treats Mendoza's second and third works, El misterio de la cripta embrujada (1979) and El laberinto de las aceitunas (1982), comic detective novels written during and about the crucial era of the transition to democracy. Chapter V analyzes Mendoza's narrative perspective regarding Barcelona of the 1990s in Sin noticias de Gurb (1990) and Una comedia ligera (1996).