The Great Leather Generation Swindle
97
introduction directly quotes the chief editor of an important publishing house
such as Anagrama is indeed self-explanatory and further blurs the distinction
between real literary criticism and simple editorial promotion.
The Nadal award continued to promote Leather Literature through the late
nineties; it was given in 1998 to Lucia Etxebarria for her second novel, Bealriz
and the Celestial Bodies (Bealriz y los cuerpos celestes) and another Leather
writer, Ignacio Garcia-Valiflo, was the runner-up with The Caress o f the
Scorpion (La caricia del escorpion).
It is significant that the only relevant dates concerning this supposedly
revolutionary social and literary movement are those of literary awards, yet one
more indication that Leather Literature might have been little more than a vast
publishing strategy, scheduled to end at the turn of the century; as a matter of
fact, the last award given to a young Leather-oriented author was the 1999
Planeta award, which went to Espido Freire for her third novel, Frozen Peaches
(Melocotones helados). Most of these young writers appear to have been
manipulated at the same time as the public, for very few of them were able to
survive past the nineties; this was not a generation expressing a coherent,
collective consciousness but a disparate group of young writers, some better
than others, who were oriented by a marketing strategy towards the same
artificial trend, which may very well have inhibited their creativity and
compromised their future in literature.
These authors, in my view, cannot be considered as a coherent group, for
the concept of group involves sharing common interests, values, and aims. For
instance, the Mexican group known as “The Crack Generation” (Jorge Volpi,
Eloy Arroz, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Angel Palau, etc.) shared literary values and
common goals, so they joined forces in order to enter the Mexican literary field
and co-wrote a manifesto which obtained great success among Mexican cultural
circles. Another similar case, in South America, was McOndo, a collective
formed by Edmundo Paz Soldan, Alberto Fuguet, and Santiago Roncagiolo,
among others, who joined forces against the aesthetics of Magic Realism, in an
attempt to provoke the symbolic death of their literary parents (the Generation of
the Latin-American Boom) and as a way of gaining a foothold in the literary
world.
In opposition, the different narrative voices which compose the Leather
Literature movement in Spain could not produce one single common text, or
declaration of principles (as the Crack Generation did) and appear to have been
bound together merely by publishing coups, such as literary awards and
publications in the style of the Yellow Pages. Where the Crack Generation spoke
in one voice, the Leather, rebellious young authors let the publishing industry do
the talking for them.
The writers who appear in the compilation of Yellow Pages were bom
between 1960 and 1974; in other words, this is a generation that spans 14 years,
which seems excessive, to say the least, as individual ex W&