At the beginning of Aguirre, the gorgeous says Manuel Vicent Jesus Aguirre, in 1985, already Duke of Alba, King introduced him, saying: "Your Majesty, I present to my future biographer," to Which, of course, the King replied, laughing: "Damn, Jesus, because as I tell you everything, you aviado. "
Twenty years later, Vincent has published this book, which is certainly not a biography, but that pivots around the figure of Jesus Aguirre, a truly remarkable character. And I think I do mean to call character because Aguirre was always, wherever he went, a theatrical play, masks, histrionics, concealment and imposture, so nobody, or almost no one could distinguish between fog and see so many , his true personality, ambitions, sorrows and genuine feelings.
About this son of a single mother, who studied in Germany in the years fifty with the help of some rich, ordained in the sixties, secularized at the end of the decade, and emerged as a key player in editing quality trials in Spain (in a glorious era of the editorial Taurus), I read almost hyperbolic praise already in the early seventies in several places, including in the journal Triumph or Fernando Savater first book, praises embedded in passages and then cited his vast culture and his sharp tongue. With Transition, Jesus Aguirre was appointed Director General of Music in the first government of the UCD, in 1977, he served, among other things, a springboard for intimacy with the Duchess of Alba, so much in love and marry her, and thus become the Duke of Alba until his death in 2001. And all this while maintaining his whole life, homosexual relationships more or less constant and hardly discreet. (Juan García Hortelano, Vincent says, warned him one day: "Jesus, you are not the Duke of Alba.'ve Really only got the scholarship Alba and if you leave the language and you do not behave, you're going to remove" . And that Aguirre had gotten both the aristocratic character, for example, to leave that same evening he told Horton: "Tomorrow delivery to the Milanese." Like a Duke of medieval or Renaissance!)
I said that Vincent has not written a biography, not nearly. Rather has compiled a series of prints, in many of which, yes, Aguirre is the shaft. Vincent saw some, and others do not know if it has made a reliable reconstruction or has been driven by the drive fictional. But in addition to Aguirre, there are other characters in the book (without going further, it Vicent, young and indecisive and a bit disoriented, the gallery Juana Mordo or alleged then-girlfriend, Vicky Lobo, who seems more like an archetype or summary many women in the Transition), and several passages where Vicent testing a synthetic chronicle of the political and social development of Spain from 50 and 80.
With this mixture, the book loses force. In fact, that same feeling came to me years ago by reading other books about memoirs of Vincent, as Tram or Malvarrosa Garden Villa Valeria . His style is very powerful, but what works great in a column, a travelogue or a portrait of someone in three folios, genres in which Vincent is a teacher, serving not as a book. And just disjointed Vicent books because the style does not save it all, is not enough to put together a great book.
also Aguirre, the gorgeous fragments where Vincent has already read it sounds like, as those of environment or synthesis time, and others, valuable in isolation, not just to have full effect in the set. Moreover, that flow from the author's memory seems to establish a relationship between socio-political events and biographical Aguirre avatars, in my opinion, is far from clear. These pages Vicente where in a few paragraphs summarizing the history of Spain are, again, as its columns. But here abound. Because
about life and attitudes of Aguirre, which would have been enough to fill the book, fit better psychological interpretations, or psychoanalytic, that socio-political. Its origin, in a traditional Cerradicas, like son of a single mother should ask for more aid your child to study, which does not mean that Aguirre's disdain and almost hidden in its brightest times, the radical and carefree absence of the father, both affected him, his vanity and affectation unbound, or, above all, his tremendous ambition for social advancement, that did not stop or even to reach the summit at the home of Alba, are aspects of a complex personality, very complex pieces that builds Vicent, and humorous or striking they are, fail to describe fully.
Because Duke was the priest and much more. Jesus Aguirre, I think, alive has escaped the author. And not just because he was a teacher in hiding, a specialist in escapism, an enigma after verbal and social brilliance, but because Vincent had other ideas, mounting a grotesque tableau discontinuous, and not a true attempt to understand and explain Jesus Aguirre in all its facets, including that any, in the most noble or less grotesque. (Aside: there is almost nothing in the text over the years in which, long before the end of the eighties, seemed habérselo swallowed by the earth. Do not publish any book more, ceased to see, it seems, all his old friends, and immersed in another world, or in other occupations. What happened? What felt and did in these last fifteen years of his life? Was depressed? Is your marriage collapsed? "He continued to write, but not publish? We know nothing, and since then Vincent has hardly entered this period that he no longer treated him.)
A Vicent has been, however, a generally entertaining book, which contains juicy anecdotes, funny grotesque episodes , and some phrases, Aguirre, or their "friends" that show a wit and malice in the use of the verb that readers make us a good time. Too bad that all this does not reach for a book more depth.
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