Farándula

Author: Marta Sanz
- Fiction
- Anagrama
- ISBN: 9788433998002
- Release Date: 04-30-2016
-Reviewed by: Brendan Riley

Marta Sanz’s novel Farándula is impressive in many ways, and it’s easy to understand why it was chosen as the 2015 winner of the Herralde Novel Prize. “Farándula” is a Spanish word which means “show business” or “the theatrical world,” and, true to its title, Sanz’s novel offers her readers a diverse, engaging cast of characters, all of them involved in one way or another with the world of Spanish and European show business, including children’s theater, serious repertory acting, TV reality programs, and top-flight Hollywood-style film productions.

Farándula is a brilliant, biting satire of the entertainment world which grapples with the human struggle to achieve individuation and find peace within one’s own self-conception. The novel engages Shakespeare’s stock notion that all the world’s a stage, and explores, questions, and sends up the notion that everything we do is a kind of performance and that, in addition to the public with whom people, especially actors, try to connect and please, we are, inevitably, our own most scrutinizing critics, our own most demanding audience. In this way, Farándula presents a comical house of mirrors in which the characters, in their complex, guarded relationships, reflect, augment, shrink, magnify, and distort one another. The novel’s theatrical fabric stretches back to the classical repertoire of Spain’s Golden Age, (the story opens and closes in the heart of Madrid, steps from Spain’s most important and historical theaters), celebrates and laments the age of great modern drama, and flits between the cross-pollinating worlds of TV, cinema, and post-modern theater in which movies are sometimes adapted for the stage. 

The novel’s drama alternates primarily between three, seamlessly interwoven main plots: the mishaps of Spanish film star––not superstar––Daniel Valls, recent winner of the Copa Volpi for his gripping interpretation of a lone assassin, and his marriage to the elegant French “philanthropist broker” Charlotte Saint-Clair; the struggles of Daniel’s closest friend, Valeria Falcón, a talented stage actress who finds herself trying to care for the geriatric Ana Urrutia––a fallen grand dame of the Spanish theater who has suffered a stroke; and the sudden success of a newly-minted star of reality TV and the Madrid stage, one Natalia de Miguel, Valeria’s young friend, and the protégé of both Valeria and jaded thespian Lorenzo Lucas. 

Throughout the novel’s three sections (“Faralaes” i.e. “frills” or “flounces”; Tarántula; and “La Falconcita”) comprising 28 chapters, Sanz charts these characters’ barometric peregrinations as they face the vicissitudes of a fickle, entertainment-addled world whose stars must be both objects of desire and scapegoats, (both guises equally disposable), a world which demands immediate satisfaction but which, increasingly, shuns the potentially cathartic revelations of true drama and stagecraft in favor of the superficial business of the limelight.

Sanz masterfully marshals an impressive, encyclopedic, sometimes kaleidoscopic, array of language and styles, realized through a playfully muscular and crystalline contemporary lexicon as bright, revealing, and well-ordered as the lights framing a dressing room mirror. She employs traditional omniscient narration that also shifts between and balances multiple points of view, as well as several chapters narrated entirely in the first person; vivid description; sharp dialogue embedded in precise, philosophical narrative that is psychoanalytical, playful, morose, tragical, and humorous––from brutally barbed and sardonic to whimsical and light-hearted, and offers excellent displays of interior dramatic monologue (conjuring Samuel Beckett’s mordant hilarity) and sprightly, unpredictable epic cataloguing, all of which which enable Sanz to weave a dazzling literary tapestry that feels critically and aesthetically reflective of the zeitgeist of our age, so painfully, Structurally complex, vitally critical, and thoroughly engrossing, Farándula meets the requirements and fulfills the promise of the best novels, those fictions which confront the disjuncture between our collective desire to be successful performers and the almost inevitable failures of our best intentions, often because we cannot tell the difference between personality and performance, between reflection and reality.

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