Las cuatro esquinas

"Las cuatro esquinas", an essential book in the production of Manuel Longares, is a novel made up of four short novels that recreate seventy years of Spanish history. The four autonomous titles have different characters, different narrative points of view and their referential time is, respectively, the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and 2000. The whole forms a representative mosaic of that broad period , equivalent to the life of an individual from childhood to old age. The city of Madrid is always the stage; squares, streets and neighborhoods of the capital, commercial and leisure establishments, educational and cultural buildings appear constantly and are essential in the course of events. Madrid is the protagonist of this work, it is a city felt by the author, and it is also the symbolic space where the fusion of opposites stands out: comedy and tragedy, cultured and popular, oral and written language, reality and invention. Originality and avant-garde stand out in this fiction.