Home | Books By Year | Books from 1997
Payasos en la lavadora
Buy Payasos en la lavadora now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the book. And once you've experienced the book, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'Payasos en la lavadora' ('Clowns in the Washing Machine') is a humorous novel written in Spanish by the Spanish Basque film maker lex de la Iglesia in 1997. It tells the experiences of a bohemian writer during Bilbao's Main Week fiestas.
Plot summary
lex de la Iglesia signs only two pages of this novel. In this introduction he states he has found a laptop computer lost by the poet Juan Carlos Satrstegui. On it, he has read a file called 'Payasos en la lavadora'. Since Satrstegui has entered a mental sanatorium, de la Iglesia talks with the writer's mother and decides to publish the text after correcting it. It is a parody of the old literary technique of the false document found by chance, probably influenced by the fact that, in real life, de la Iglesia writes his film scripts on a laptop computer, which he has lost at least twice.
According to this introduction, the rest of the fifteen chapters are Juan Carlos Satrstegui's autobiographical tale. Satrstegui considers himself a genius, superior to all those he comes across. But the reader soon realises his psychic problems (obsessions, deliria, paranoia, lack of empathy) become worse due to the drugs he uses in fiestas, the want of slept and the beatings he earns when dealing with the lumpen.
Allusions/references to other works
The novel is full of references to popular culture (the very title is about a Spanish TV commercial advertisement for machine soap) and philosophy, with strong contrasts between a literary and grandiloquent language and a rude and crude one, depending on Satrstegui's unstable moods.
Category:Spanish satirical novels
Category:1997 novels
Category:Basque literature
Category:Novels set in Spain
Category:Bilbao
Buy Payasos en la lavadora now from Amazon
<-- Return to books from 1997