Rafael Chirbes only became popular in Spain after the Great Recession hit and his 2007 novel Crematorium turned out to be extremely prescient. (Not that you needed to be a genius to figure out that Spain’s corrupt construction industry was bad news and was on the verge of popping like a rotten papaya).
Before that, Chirbes was popular among two groups: literary critics and Germans. His books sold like hotcakes in Germany. I could never figure out why until I started reading Chirbes’s diaries. It turned out he was very much into German literature. Read every German writer in existence. And apparently somehow this Germanized his own writing in a way that German readers perceived and liked.
I’ve read a fair number of Germans but Chirbes’s diaries give a crash course in German literature of which I never even heard.
It’s fascinating how these things work. People feel these affinities without needing them to be named.
Clarissa's Blog 