Everly (Spanish, Syracuse U.) samples some treatments of social consciousness and national identity in Spanish novels of the past 20 years, suggesting ways of looking at the genre rather than
trying to fit it into any particular set of features. The texts lead her to a structuralist theoretical model, she says, but history and politics are never far. Indeed she finds some works so
specific to a time and place that they quickly become dated and outdated. Her topics include sacred violence in Carme Riera's Dins el darrer blau, the impossible invention of history and the
hero in Javier Cerca's Soldados de Salamina and La Velocidad de la luz, textual violence and the hyper-real in De todo lo visible y lo invisible by Luc穩a Etxebarria, and intertextuality in Jos矇
�ngel Ma簽as; Historias de Kornen and La pella. Annotation 穢2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
