102
Popular Culture Review
Maestre, with The Book Sandra Gavrilich Wanted Me to Write
for Her returns to the novel of the [new] generation. As if the
same generation that he had survived in Killing Dinosaurs
With a Sling Shot persisted 10 years later in this obstinate and
useless experience for self-destruction.7
It seems that the publishing industry has recently decided to promote
historical novels and some authors from the Leather Generation have suddenly
discovered a great interest for history, such as Francisco Casavella, who won the
Nadal Award in 2008 for a novel set in the 18,h century, What I Know About
Vampires (Lo que se de los vampiros) and Martas, who has recently published
The Secret o f the Oracle (El secreto del oraculo). But Martas, whose novel,
Stories o f Kronen, was considered the first of the Leather Generation is far from
receiving the attention from the media he once did, for he was first and foremost
identified with that particular generation. He has become a genuine example of
an author digested by a marketing strategy, genre-cast, and whose literary voice
has all but died at the same time his publisher’s distribution strategy concluded
its cycle.
Benjamin Prado is still somewhat present, but his preferences have become much more
traditional and he no longer wears lizard skin boots. His latest novel, Evil People Walking
(Mala gente que camina), published in 2006, is set during the forties, in post-war Spain,
and denounces the abuses of Franco’s fascist regime. One cannot help but notice the
opportunism of such a theme at this particular moment when Spanish society is precisely
involved in the process of re-examining its recent history and formally condemning the
excesses of Franco’s rule.
However, the most adaptable writer from the Leather Generation has to be Ray Loriga,
who has recently directed Teresa, the Body o f Christ (Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo), a film
based upon the life of Santa Teresa de Jesus, the Catholic mystic from the Golden
Century. It seems that, at least for Loriga—a pioneer of the Leather Generation—beer
and rock n’ roll have given way to one of the most fundamental figures of Spanish
Catholicism.
Among the Leather authors, once saluted by the media as the future of Spanish literature,
only Lucia Etxebarria has survived without major adaptation. She still writes about the
same themes in the same way as she did IS years ago, appears in anthologies such as
What Men D on‘t Know About Sex (Lo que los hombres no saben de sexo), and still claims
to be speaking for her “entire generation,” the identity of which appears foggier than
ever. For instance, on her webpage, Etxebarria does not hesitate to describe her latest
novel, Cosmofobia (Cosmofobia), in these clear, if slightly redundant terms: “The
collective scream of an entire generation” (el grito colectivo de toda una generacion).
Promotionally speaking, Etxbarria has survived thanks to the attention given by the
media to women’s literature in general and has been able to escape the fate of her
unfortunate former companions from the Leather Generation, who have for the most part
succumbed to a general lack of interest from both the public and the publishers.
The promotion of the Leather Literature movement in Spain during the
nineties is one of the most blatant examples of modem publishing manipulation,
the consequences of which are still to be evaluated at several levels. How did it