Ramón

Another writer I ought to admire more is Ramón Gómez de la Serna.  He is an interesting and attractive figure, you could argue,, as one of the first vanguard writers in Spain, and a master of the short form, which I ought to admire. Yet his achievement doesn't add up to what it ought to be. His writing ends up being a bit thin, especially at greater lengths. His novelas de la nebulosa are an interesting concept, though a bit derivative of Unamuno's Niebla. Try reading one of them, though. He just can't sustain a plot or novelistic structure. El novelista is an early example of metafiction, but ends up being tedious, as I discovered when I assigned it to students. In one novel, Rebeca, the main character invents an imaginary girlfriend to get out of an awkward question, and then spends the rest of the novel looking for her in real life. Of course it's written from a male perspective and leaves itself wide open to a feminist critique, like a lot of his work. I would defend it, except that it ends up being a bit tedious. He isn't a great prose stylist, despite the fact that his claim to fame is the invention of a stylistic device: the surprising and humorous metaphor he called the greguería.