book: El Buscon | Francisco de Quevedo ...

book: El Buscon | Francisco de Quevedo ...

books:


	• El Buscon Francisco de Quevedo Catedra, 2006 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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the catalogue of mysanthropy

While Góngora represented the costumbrismo, the brighter (but not the lighter), more classical side of Spanish baroque, Quevedo was the biggest representative of the creacionismo. This tendency in theory relied on word-plays and witty games with the form and the meaning but in fact it was not much different from the above-mentioned style. Still, Quevedo is a far cry in content to Góngora's works, as he had a much more pessimistic world-view. The eerie quality of his poems is achieved by combining this playful style with the darkest subjects. But the most macabre work from Quevedo, was El Buscón, which took the clichés of the picaresque novels to the extreme, both in content and in form. The parents of Pablos, the hero, according to tradition were criminals, but here their crimes are mostly hideous and described in gratuitous details. The trials across which Pablos must pass through are also taken to extreme, the descriptions are generously filled with excrement, vomit and every imaginable humours of the human body. To crown all of this, contrasted with the petty crimes the picaros commit, Pablos kills a man for no particular reason, which makes the conversion at the end of the book seem ironic and not very plausible. Like in Goya's dark series of pictures, the author offers a catalogue of the world's ugliness, a pessimistic world view taken to the extreme. What makes the novel even more creepy is Quevedo's ability to mix the grotesque details with everyday details from life, and thus he does not alienate us completely from his work. His novel can be considered the summation of the misanthrope details of his poems, neatly embedded in the traditions of the most popular kind of novel in that age, the picaresque, to assure that it would sell well and his dark ideas can spread all over the country. Creepy.

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