By ERIVELTO DA ROCHA CARVALHO*
Commentary on Pedro Almodóvar's book
Published last year with wide distribution in the Hispanic world and Brazilian translation in the year that is now ending, The last dream, by Pedro Almodóvar was succeeded in Spain by the editing of the script for The room next door, a film based, in turn, on the novel What are you going through? (2021) by American writer Sigrid Nunez, translated in Brazil by Carla Fortino with the title What are you facing.
Before that, Pedro Almodóvar had published two books also with stories of a different nature: Fire in the bowels (1981) and Pathy Diphusa and other texts (1991). Both generally followed the comic and provocative tone for which their cinema was widely recognized and awarded.
Although it is not Pedro Almodóvar's first foray into the literary universe, his most recent work has the peculiarity of bringing together a series of stories in which the author presents a vision of himself, based on a persona constructed in paralleltand his recognized and award-winning film career.
Even though he repeatedly refers to his filmography and recovers the iconic figure of the sex symbol Pathy Diphusa (a kind of alter ego or jocular heteronym of the author), the book claims his figure as a writer as a kind of relatively autonomous destiny, which is made known in the last dream through the particular code of literary language.
Pedro Almodóvar as a writer
The book’s “Introduction” serves as a prologue and, at the same time, is a kind of map of an autobiography that was lived and not yet written. In the presentation of the twelve stories that make up the work, Pedro Almódovar makes a point of emphasizing that the book that the reader has in his hands is deliberately intended not to write a biography in use, although he recognizes that it presents something similar to a “fragmented, incomplete and somewhat cryptic” autobiography.
Some of the stories presented refer to passages from the filmmaker's life, such as the death of his mother in “El último sueño” or the beautiful tribute he wrote to the Mexican singer Chavela Vargas (“Adiós, volcán”). The last two stories in the book appear as a kind of fragments of the author's diaries (“Memoria de un día vacío” and “Una mala novela”) and the rest can be placed in the category of short fictions or fragments of film scripts whose complete identification with the civil biography of Pedro Almodóvar Caballero is, at the very least, difficult and risky.
In a world saturated with autofiction, on the one hand, and biographies and autobiographies, on the other hand, Almodóvar chooses to follow a separate path and presents a cryptic biography that can only be decoded (if it is to be so) based on the relationship between the writer's life and writing, which, in turn, transcends the figure of the writer and is related to his performance as a producer and creator of film arguments and scripts.
It is, without a doubt, a kind of secret autobiography that does not present itself as such and that asks the reader for a certain complicity when trying to understand it, since the figure who is now writing it is not the successful filmmaker or the young iconoclast who lived through the euphoria of the Movida Madrileña, but the character who describes himself as “someone darker, more austere and more melancholic, with fewer certainties, more insecure and more afraid”, a writer who as such forges himself amidst the changes in the world during the first years of the new millennium.
Cinema and literature
This new literary Almodóvar says that it is precisely from this kind of diffuse melancholy and from all kinds of genre hybridism (one of the stories is called “Too Much Genre Change”, referring to the famous film Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown and the intertextual network traced in this work between Jean Cocteau, Tennessee William and John Cassavaettes) that his literature is structured (defining it as postmodern) in the sense of his tendency to appropriate everything within his reach, as he does when inserting a certain type of music in his films, or from the literary treatment he gives to his scripts, which, in turn, is based on and intrinsically linked to his frustrated attempts to assert himself as a writer before he was one.
Pedro Almodóvar, a writer from the 2000s, takes us back to the unknown Almodóvar from Madrid in the 70s/80s, and that is where the bridge is established in The last dream isbetween the fictional fragments of stories such as “Vida y muerte de Miguel” and the fragments of staged or non-staged films, as in the stories “La visita” (a piece of Bad Education in literary form) and others like “La redención” (an exotic species of The Last Temptation of Christ), “La ceremonia del espejo” (an unfilmed vamp-movie) and, finally, “Juana, la bela durmiente”, a surprising story that configures an Almodovarian rewriting of the history of Spain through the hands of his much highlighted Laws of Desire.
“Amarga Navidad”, the only story left to mention here, is organized precisely around this dubious and nebulous zone between fiction and life, cinema and literature, the title of which has already been given to the filmmaker’s next film, currently in production.
Latest observations
In addition to being a terrible novelist (according to the current canons of the publishing market), it can be safely said that in the last dream the subject of the biography is conspicuous by his absence, and therein lies, paradoxically, one of the great attractions of Pedro Almodóvar's work. Something that makes it distinct from the usual "memoir" books, but that brings it closer to other biographies (although of a radically different nature) such as that of Luis Buñuel, who in my last breath (1982) stated that intelligence without the possibility of expressing itself is not intelligence.
The texts that make up his book of stories (as defined by the author, who thus consciously deviates from genre restrictions) give us this character who writes as he walks (as in the mental exercise of “Memoria de un día vacío”) or who, giving up the illusion of seeking to write the “great novel”, is content to prepare himself to write a bad novel or the possible novel (as in “La mala novela”). A novel that as such begins by dealing with the voice of the writer himself.
Despite the notable differences, there is something of the humor and self-centered irony of Pathy Difusa in this literary, melancholic and circumspect Pedro Almodóvar. Moreover, his writing surreptitiously emulates the irony of one of the most prominently metaliterary contemporary Spanish authors, Enrique Vila-Matas, by exposing, in this kind of non-biographical biography, something akin to a setback that advances and indicates new directions, as in Mac and his setback (2017), work by the Catalan fiction writer cited in the story that closes the book.
The Brazilian translation of the last dream was in charge of Miguel del Castillo. It would be easy, but not very practical, to compare Pedro Almodóvar's book to a certain tradition of Spanish literature that mixes life and literary artifice, such as that which includes authors such as Quevedo or Torres Villaroel. Despite this, it is worth saying that by looking back and to the past, Almodóvar's fiction ultimately raises a question about a storm that cannot be explained, one that resides in the cloud of an incomplete, undefined and progressive time, such as that of cinema and that of expanding literature (as is the case in the last dream).
It is precisely in this kind of uncertainty that resides not Pedro Almodóvar's final word, but his penultimate word on the passage of time in the era in which we live.
*Erivelto da Rocha Carvalho é Professor of Spanish and Hispanic-American Literature at the University of Brasilia (UnB).
Reference
Pedro Almodovar. the last dream. Barcelona, Reservoir Books, 2023, 208 pages. [https://amzn.to/4gHnipx]
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