Made in Spain

If history has always been written by the winners, in the case of Spain's youth music of the late '50s and early '60s, it has basically been told by the records, first by the few that were actually released, and finally by the lucky ones that enjoyed certain success and critical appreciation. Set aside as marginal, the rest have been left ignored due to the debatable and apparently set in stone statement that the history of Spanish rock starts with the legendary festivals at Madrid's Price venue promoted by musician Pepe Nieto, then drummer in Los Pekenikes. Without wanting to reduce in the slightest the importance of those shows as a revitalizing element of Spain's rock scene, the start date of those famed Madrid matinees (end of 1962) doesn't respect the fact that at the end of the '50s, and at the pace that the autarkic Spanish society of the time allowed, the foreign young rhythms slowly reached the country with the healthy intention to stay and make people dance.

This is the first, book-length study of the six travel narratives published by the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Preliminary chapters focus on technical and thematic aspects of travel-writing, and on the author's approach to the genre. Cela's travel works, which appeared between 1948 and 1986, are examined in turn, with a focus on the construction of the narratives and also on the themes that are developed in each of them. There is an assessment of the author's treatment of topographical, cultural, historical…