La Zona Fantasma: Literary Life and Death

I have been writing this column [for El Pais] for thirty-three months now, and on occasion I find myself obliged to ask my readers (the ones with the sharp memories, at least) to forgive me for revisiting certain topics that I have discussed before. But reality can be insistent, things have a way of staying the same, and sometimes, when history repeats itself over and over again, I feel I have no choice but to acknowledge the persistence of things.

About two years ago, I wrote about a literary prize, the Ciudad de Torrevieja award, which was news to me at the time but which the newspapers and television stations in Spain were buzzing about at length for one reason and one reason alone: because it was, at €360,000, the second-most-generous literary award in Spain, surpassed only by the Planeta Prize. According to the mayor of Torrevieja, the city that sponsored the award and in whose name it was offered, the prize was established “in an effort to improve the image of the city, which has always been associated with the tourist trade of the middle class” (and more recently, it seems, of mafias). I titled that particular article “Literature as Soap and Whitewash.”

This year in Spain, the announcements of both the Ciudad de Torrevieja and the Planeta prizewinners were mired in controversy. In the first case, the head of the jury that awarded the prize, Caballero Bonald, made no bones about the vote he cast against the winning novel, which he called “ideologically detestable.” From my very literary perspective, such a reason is not necessarily enough to compromise the quality of a piece of literature.The Spanish newspaper El Mundo, however, ideologically somewhat aligned with the award winner in question, who appears on the church-owned radio station, stated that “according to the official register of published books, [the author in question] has published the highly unusual number of twenty-seven books (some of considerable length) between 2004 and 2005.”Twenty seven. More than one a month, as you can see. Now, I have been writing and publishing books since the age of nineteen, and I know the kind of effort that is required to write even one book that I would consider acceptable (I being my most favorable critic, that is). I also know, from experience, the time it takes to type out pages, even if only in the interest of rendering a legible, clean version of what one has written. With this in mind, then, I can think of only three explanations for the case in question: that the desk drawers of the most recent winner of the Torrevieja prize were literally overflowing with...