Is it possible to go through the downpour of History without getting wet by a single drop? Can we cross the world in a shower of atoms and return home completely dry? Can time be stopped? These are some of the questions asked Santiago Alba Rico in your wonderful essay Praise of literature. Parallel workswhere, in a way that is as free as it is respectful of literary tradition, this thinker, guided by his tastes, addresses the commentary on a series of novels, from Kafka to Proust, including Austen, Melville, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Hergé, Potter, McCullers, Mary Shelley, Dickens and Hasek. Rather than resolving the problems posed by the questions the author asks, Alba Rico dissolves them by expanding on the possibilities for reflection they offer.
It would seem that its author, with this book, adopts, perhaps consolidates, a turn in his intellectual career, and an unclassifiable philosophy, due to its singularity, in works such as Capitalism and nihilism either Penultimate days. Goods, machines, menmoves on to a philosophy—because it is undoubtedly the book of a philosopher—focused on the sensitivity and attractiveness of the ideas that the selected works suggest. In any case, the reference books of these authors (mostly Anglo-Saxon) —The Metamophorsis, Moby Dick, Don Quixote de la Mancha, The Idiot, Tintin in Tibet…— constitute a kind of personal sanctuary to which Alba Rico claims to have returned again and again throughout his life – five readings of each of the books chosen by him is his average frequency -, and this is undoubtedly the case judging by the mastery he has of plots and characters. I say ostentatious, but there is no ostentation in his work and that, the humility in which he places himself morally, makes his reading intense and captivating. Nothing about giving lessons, nothing about feeling strengthened by the rectitude of his opinions, Alba Rico is just a reader and as a reader surrendered to the idea that creation is everything. A man, in short, who loves literature and has made reading a profession of faith (a faith that perhaps moves mountains), as he already anticipated in a previous book titled Read with children (2007).
I confess that I am reluctant to praise and defend literature conceived as an essayistic microgenre. I don’t understand very well what literature needs to be defended from, because what deserves to be defended does not depend on literature and therefore I see it as useless to strive in this direction: there it is, standing on its own, like all true art. And so, with some caution, I opened the essay. Similar prevention to what I immediately felt in the face of the closed defense made of fiction and its autonomy, that is, of the separation of the writer with respect to his creation, proposing the superiority of the works in relation to the authors who conceived them. He defines this author-work distance (epistemological) as narrative dysphoria. An approach that, based on Russian formalism, is commonly accepted in literary theory. But is Alba Rico right? I doubt this forced separation or dysphoria and it saddens me to think that I must deny to a man or a woman the greatness of having been responsible for a work that I admire. Why should the work be considered superior to the one who created it with his guts, with his thoughts and obsessions, with his passions and discouragements? They are simply different dimensions: human achievement and result, they do not allow comparison.
That said, with the intention, however, of continuing to think about it, I only had to let myself be carried away by the dense and intelligent comments that are lavished in the book to forget about any theoretical reservations and understand that I was facing a very fine literary analysis and a way of approaching the commentary of a group of novels, paired together. Plutarchcapable of building an intellectual pattern of reading that is as coherent as it is free. How does this pattern operate? Firstly, in a way that ignores any critical methodology. Alba Rico weaves her writing through the structuring of all types of associations—emotional, aesthetic, analytical, philosophical and also biographical—as it suits her, bringing to light tensions—whether that of the self-world relationship if we talk about Austen; the foundation of a psychology of time in Proust; the compassion that Dostoevsky feels for the oppressed in their pitiful misfortune; the historical envelope that weighs so much in The heart is a lonely hunterthe function of English comfort in The Pickwick Club Papers…—that transcend the understanding of the novel it deals with at each moment. And like all genuine research, the result could not be more gratifying. In two words: the book is a cry that cries out against the cultural contraction of our time, showing with the force of ideas the plurality of interests that a great novel contains. Can the world be changed with all this? The answer is no—Alba Rico himself confirms this—but literature helps broaden its boundaries and in this sense it shows that it is essential.
Curiously, the piece dedicated to Quixote in which the author seems to have the least confidence and feel most insecure is where he achieves, in my opinion, his greatest analytical achievement. The way the novel is approached, delving into the harshness of Spanish culture and the fragility of the character, is a superb exercise in structuring all the factors involved in Cervantes’ work. In summary, do we have something to thank Santiago Alba Rico for? If not, one thing is that it leads us, as its readers, to the beating heart of literature. A feast.
Santiago Alba Rico
Akal, 2026
552 pages. 26.90 euros
