Santas y Mártires

Description

A small family mess involving a pornographic novella and a race for the Senate leads Moran Gabor—a dabbler, bon vivant, factory of aphorisms, intimate enemy of his enemies, and intellectual who feels his muses have abandoned him—to end up as a screenwriter for a Roman epic filmed in 1960s Madrid, a city that had turned into a vast Hollywood set where Americans and the powerful had free rein over all the pleasures forbidden to ordinary Spaniards.

That city, which at first seems gray and dull, ends up revealing an abyss of impossible divas, Parisian cabaret muses, carefree effeminate youths, even more carefree marquises, unmoored folkloric singers, and tyrannical producers—all of them at a crucial moment in their lives, willing to cling to a burning lifeline bearing Moran Gabor’s name and surname.

With a prose style that seems to have been aging for decades and the sparkling dialogue already present in Calypso (of which Saints and Martyrs functions as a spin-off), Rafael de Jaime Juliá has created a story that sometimes feels like Capote and other times like Berlanga, where characters from screwball comedy collide with others worthy of esperpento. It does not seem written here, nor in this time, yet it resonates powerfully in any moment or place through its defense of the power of words, its praise of intuition, and its firm and necessary celebration of pleasure and beauty—whether in the hands of hustlers or marquises, in palaces or taverns.

Guillermo Alonso