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- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
High times withGeneración X
By the mid 1990s a gang of writers that were too young
(sometimes too unborn) to recall Francoist Spain were
writing a new kind of dirty realism. Inspired by the
hedonisticmovidalifestyle of 1980s Madrid, their
novels delved into a nihilistic youth culture where sex
and drugs appeared abundant.The standout novel from
Spain’s very ownGeneración Xis José Ángel Mañas’
Historias del Kronen(1994), logging the bad behaviour
of a group of 20-somethings at the Kronen bar in
Madrid. Violeta Hernando’sMuertos o algo mejor
(1996), published when its author was still in her teens,
has a marginally more compassionate undercurrent,
whileTokio ya no nos quiere(1999) by Ray Loriga joins a
drug salesman as he travels around peddling a memory
erasing pill. Loriga, the leading author of Spain’s
Generación X, apparently drew on his own experiences
of epileptic seizure for some of the novel’s passages on
memory loss.
