El nivel alcanzado

This volume brings together a selection of reviews, articles, lectures and forewords on "foreign" books and authors written over the course of three decades. The set accounts for a great diversity of interests, which are projected in different times, traditions and genres. From Lawrence Sterne to V.S. Naipaul, passing through Stendhal, Musil, Kipling, Malraux, Gombrowicz, Canetti or Iris Murdoch; from William Hazlitt to George Steiner, through Walter Benjamin or Raymond Williams, the names gathered here are so many milestones of the particular cartography that Ignacio Echevarría has been configuring as a reader as he developed his activity as critic and editor. Robert Musil said that criticism is "an interpretation of literature that transposes itself into an interpretation of life, and a jealous custody of the level reached". The title of this volume emerges from these words, of which Andreu Jaume, responsible for the edition, says in his foreword that "it is much more than a simple compilation of reviews and essays on authors and works in foreign languages. Its content can be analyzed in the light of what was the parallel reading that Ignacio Echevarría did in his day of Spanish literature published since the Transition. The constellation of authors gathered here is not so much a personal canon as a commitment to ambition that is moral, political and aesthetic at the same time".