Chirbes had always been attracted to literature and cinema, but found the vastness of formal abstraction terrifying. History was a system, it tied things down and grounded them, brought things from the fanciful into an initial structure that allowed him to pose questions through literature and use the form of the novel to seek knowledge, to place an object in the light, to apprehend it long enough to distinguish its mechanics and intricacies. History was a boomerang — the past through the light of the present and its projection into the future. “You can’t see anything without history because if you don’t comprehend the evolution of things, you’ll never understand anything. Either you bear witness to your time, or you become a symptom of it.”
After returning to Spain, Chirbes settled into a tiny four-hundred-soul town in Badajoz, Extremadura. He wrote travel and culinary pieces to get by, but plunged into eleven years of fervent reading, rereading and writing. By night, he would frequent the town’s profusion of bars and argue with the local socialists about how the cause had been sold for a few measly government contracts. He produced a fine second novel, En la lucha final, and a third, La buena letra, written in the feminine voice against the “new pragmatism” which he said could be summed up perfectly in a phrase by Deng Xiaoping: “Black cat, white cat, what does it matter, as long as it hunts rats.” He wanted his storytelling to pierce the marrow of the transition, hit that quivering moment when the scales balance and the novel finds its vantage point, its aura, firing an infinitude of meanings. “Beautiful penmanship is a costume for lies,” his protagonist laments. Chirbes believed that literature is like a lover, either you go all the way or you’ll be left alone.
When his fifth novel, La larga Marcha, came out in 1996 it became a casus belli among certain sectors of the critical apparatus in Spain. It was translated into German, and the critic Reich-Ranicki melted into a paroxysm of accolades, establishing Chirbes as the “model to follow” for the great German novel that was coming. It was “the book that Europe needed.” Chirbes became an instant bestseller there, winning prizes and a veritable phenomenon. For many years his most ardent readership was German while in Spain he was still a “cult” writer. “I’m not a priest or a politician, I’m not writing to console readers, but to awaken contradictions and disquiet.” This is part and parcel of what made Rafael Chirbes the consummate outsider in Spanish letters, the prickly, unrelenting social conscience of his generation: his was an intimate knowledge of the age-old underbelly of the human condition, he knew that victims become executioners and “no human being can be considered free of guilt.” In this he echoed Camus’s famous dictum: “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” It’s what suffuses his work with its potent edge, its sense of urgency and grit. For years he was described as a “secret” writer, which in Spain is often a euphemism to describe someone emerging from the underclasses, but as he well knew, eventually the readers are the ones to decide who is a great author, not the establishment. Chirbes the reader’s writer, Chirbes the witness of his time, Chirbes the historian: he always understood the artistic act as an ethical one, and the novel as a potent artifact for describing a particular time and place on earth, as a microcosmic representation, as a fractal, of the universal.
Novel after novel, Chirbes continued pushing form, experimenting, and became one of the greatest prose stylists of the language, forging new and original forms to renovate the boundless European tradition of social realism, adding modern, original twists to the sweeping fresco style of writers like Galdós, Balzac or Musil. Early in the new century, Rafael Chirbes returned to the Levante of his childhood, and found a solitary home in the small town of Beniarbeig, Alicante, living as a near recluse with his two dogs and two cats (he had been afraid of dogs earlier in life, and one can follow their presence throughout his novels). His tipping point came in 2007 with Crematorio, his eighth novel and a force to be reckoned with, like it or not. By now it was too dangerous for the establishment to flaunt ignorance of a writer of such a categorical stature. However uncomfortably, even the audacious few establishmentarians who still believe that history can keep a secret, yes, even they were forced to pay attention — the man isn’t going away and he writes like the devil. And Chirbes’s work proves that history cannot keep a secret. A tepidly conceded finalist for the City of Barcelona Prize that year, Crematorio landed the wildly applauded National Critic’s Award. It was about time. The novel was then adapted to television, becoming one of Spain’s most successful series ever.
In an essay (Chirbes has four books of essays) focusing on the work of one of his totem authors and a fellow member of the underclass, Juan Marsé, Chirbes writes: “He devoured his predecessors, ground them up into little pieces and built a new height over their remains from which to observe.” This is what Chirbes did in his last two books that are linked like bubbly (cava) and a hangover; Crematorio describes the Spanish soul at the beginning of the twenty-first century, particularly on the Mediterranean coast during the heyday of the real-estate bubble. But if Crematorio was about bling and bigger-than-thou yachts and beachfront properties, On the Edge takes a swan dive into the putrid bog left behind when the bubble burst. The main character is the marsh, the poisoned quagmire where the mafias dump their hot guns and cars, where toilet bowls float with construction site debris, where corpses were hacked and disposed of. It chronicles in human terms the consequences when the tower of cards came tumbling down and asks very difficult questions: Are the underclasses any better off now, than they were under Franco? Do we remember how much they struggled? “I dream about the dead people I knew when they were alive,” Chirbes said to me in Xalapa, México: “I’ve touched them, even, and now they’re nowhere, and knowing that they’re not here and that I can’t talk to them or hear their voices distresses me when I go to bed. Some nights they take control of the room: their absence leaves me breathless and I have to turn on the light so I don’t suffocate.” What has his generation done with the new democracy they were given? The word “carrion” appears in the last sentence of Crematorio and in the first one of On the Edge. “The wind has dropped again, and in the ensuing calm, from the place where the dog is scratching, a sickly smell of old carrion rises up, impregnating the air.” “The first one to spot the carrion is Ahmed Ouallahi.” The young Moroccan sees a dog chewing on something. Other dogs try to take it away. He draws closer, apprehensively. It’s a human hand.
On the Edge is a masterful example of writing at the top of its form, a centrifugal novel with sentences like sticky tentacles that clutch onto readers and suck them into a swirling, tempestuous, pulsating center. The tension comes from the language itself, from the myriad stories of his characters all told in his characteristic torrential, terse, powerful prose, whose cadences echo his beloved American writers, Faulkner, Mailer and Dos Passos. Language that is as theological as it is diabolical, that keeps a surreptitious network, or builds a web, like a dictatorship. On the Edge garnered a second National Critic’s Award and, finally, the National Prize for Literature.