Obituary: Francisco Umbral

From the Guardian:

The writer Francisco Umbral, who has died of pneumonia aged 72, was the angry man of Spanish letters. Born in Madrid, he was brought up in the provincial Castilian city of Valladolid. Following the tradition of several generations of aspirant writers, and most particularly his beloved Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, he arrived back in Madrid in 1961 to take the capital by storm with the force of his personality linked to the power of his pen. Unlike most, he succeeded.

He once stormed out of a television panel because no one was discussing his book, and he published an entire book attacking his maestro and friend Camilo José Cela after Cela’s death.

Travesía de Madrid (Madrid Crossing, 1966) was his first novel. His verbal fireworks were already in place. Umbral rejected 1950s’ social realism. He was not interested in telling a story, but in writing beautiful prose. Uninterested in plot or psychology of characters, he expressed his own vitality, views and feelings. “An aesthete to his bones,” said Delibes.