Style
Although he was born in Madrid, a city that has inspired most of his work, his early years were spent in Valladolid. His mother travelled to Madrid for his birth, because he was an illegitimate child. His mother's indifference and distance from him marked him with an enduring sadness, as did the infant death of his only son, from which event was born his saddest and most personal book, Mortal y rosa, (A Mortal Spring). This created in the author a characteristic haughty manner, devoid of hopefulness, absolutely submerged in literature, which has provoked many polemics and enmities.
In Valladolid he began his journalistic career at El Norte de Castilla, under the tutorship of Miguel Delibes. In 1961 he went to Madrid as a correspondent and quickly became a prestigious reporter and columnist in magazines such as La Estafeta Literaria, Mundo Hispánico and Interviú, and in influential newspapers such as Ya and ABC, although he is best known for his writings for the daily newspapers El País (founded in 1976 just after the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and the restoration of constitutionalism and democracy) and El Mundo (founded 1990). At El País he was one of the reporters who best was able to describe the countercultural movement known as La Movida, but his literary quality undoubtedly came from his creative fecundity, his linguistic sensibility and the extreme originality of his style, very careful and complex, creative in its syntax, very metaphorically developed and flexible, abundant in neologisms and intertextual allusions; in sum, of a demanding lyric and aesthetic quality. He practices a species of anti-bourgeois criticism of customs and manners, without renouncing a romantic ego, and, in the words of Novalis, has the intent of giving the dignity of the unknown to the everyday, impregnating it with a desolate tenderness. As a political reporter, Umbral is a highly trenchant writer. Having become a successful journalist and writer, he worked with Spain's most varied and influential magazines and newspapers. Among the many published volumes of his articles, the following stand out:
- Diario de un snob ("Diary of a snob", 1973)
- Spleen de Madrid ("Madrid Spleen", 1973, the title being a reference to Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen)
- España cañí (1975)
- Iba yo a comprar el pan ("I went out to buy bread", 1976)
- Los políticos ("Politicians", 1976)
- Crónicas postfranquistas ("Post-Francoist Chronicles", 1976)
- Las Jais ("Birds", "Chicks" 1977)
- Spleen de Madrid–2 ("Madrid Spleen–2", 1982)
- España como invento ("Spain as an invention", 1984)
- La belleza convulsa ("Convulsive Beauty", 1985)
- Memorias de un hijo del siglo ("Memories of a child of the century", 1986)
- Mis placeres y mis días ("My pleasures and my days", 1994).
Among non-readers, he is remembered by an appearance in Mercedes Milá's TV program Queremos saber in Antena 3 TV (1993). After some chatter, Umbral breaks conversation claiming that he has come to talk about his latest book, La década roja, not to entertain her
Read more about this topic: Francisco Umbral
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind.... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)