Historias — Del Kronen

The rest of the novel deals with the aftermath—or rather, the lack of aftermath. There is no police investigation. There are no tears. Carlos goes on holiday to the beach, has sex, gets drunk, and the narrative ends not with a moral epiphany, but with the mundane arrival of an electric bill. The banality of evil has rarely been so meticulously rendered.

By 1993, the euphoria was gone. The heroin that was once an artistic affectation had become an epidemic of addiction and death. The freedom had soured into an existential void. The generation that Mañas wrote about—born in the late 60s, raised in democracy—had no war to fight, no dictatorship to overthrow. They had comfortable apartments, university degrees, and absolutely no purpose. Historias Del Kronen

You cannot read a modern Spanish urban novel without seeing the shadow of Historias del Kronen . Writers like Javier Pérez Andújar (Los trenes de la noche) or Mercedes Cebrián (El malestar al alcance de todos) owe a debt to Mañas’s demolition of formal prose. The rest of the novel deals with the