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Anderson, Andrew A. Ernesto Giménez Caballero: The Vanguard Years (19211931). Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 201 1. 340 pp.
Giménez-Caballero is largely remembered for his popular literary/artistic magazine La Gaceta Literaria and his fascist affiliations. The majority of his works, particularly his more creative and experimental ones conceived during the 1920s before his so-called conversion to fascism sometime in 1929, have been given short shrift. The fact is that Giménez-Caballero was thoroughly involved in Spain's cultural scene throughout the Primo de Rivera years. He was not only quite informed through his travels and journalistic endeavors about how the various waves of - isms influenced the likes of Gómez de la Serna, Buñuel, Dalí, and Lorca, but also contributed to the period's dynamic modernity with titles like Yo, inspector de akantarillas. (Epiplasmas) (1928), perhaps his best-known work.
Anderson's Ernesto Giménez Caballero: The Vanguard Years (1921-1931) seeks to remedy the deficiency of critical understanding of Giménez-Caballeros early books published between 1921 and 1931. More concretely, he sets out to treat these early books "first and foremost as literary works . . . worthy of literary-critical analysis and judgment" (12). Excluding the introduction, conclusion, and the final chapter on Giménez Caballeros overall avant-garde trajectory, Anderson strictly divides his study chronologically dedicating each chapter to one of the author's works.
Chapter one begins with Notas marruecas de un soldado (1923), a type of travelogue that recounts Giménez Caballero's experiences as a soldier in the Africa campaign during the Annual debacle. While Notas is not characterized by any real sense of literary novelty, Anderson argues that certain aspects of its episodic structure presage the types of formal innovations that Avant-gardists were perfecting at the time. In chapter two, Anderson delves into Carteles (1927) to explore the hybrid nature of Giménez Caballero's style, which artfully melds his...