Cultural Roundabouts: Spanish Film and Novel on the Road, by Jorge
Pérez, offers the first comprehensive inquiry about the road genre in
Spain. Road narratives have recently received some scholarly attention
within the field of Peninsular Studies through a few articles and book
chapters, but no book-length study has been published so far. This book
investigates how Spanish authors such as Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Ray
Loriga, Eugenio Fuentes, and Eugenia Rico, and filmmakers such as Juan
Antonio Bardem, Cecilia Bartolomé, Fernando Guillén Cuervo, and Mariano
Barroso employ the road genre to address the reconfiguration of the
social, economic, and cultural landscape of Spain since 1975. One of the
premises of this book is that, in the context of Spanish culture, road
movies and novels should be discussed concurrently, as they emerge as a
response to the same socio-historical circumstances, share many thematic
and iconographic traits, and show reciprocal influences. The road genre,
broadly defined as movies and novels in which the characters travel by
driving a vehicle across, out of, or into the Spanish territory, offers
the opportunity to examine a country in movement and, thus, to reflect
on the topic of national mobility. This genre brings to the fore the
modernization of Spain, as highlighted by the remodeled highway system,
the development of the automobile industry, and the changes in the
landscape. In this study, Pérez argues that road stories offer lenses
through which one can observe contemporary Spain and its
transformations, but also the shortcomings of its development. It is not
a one-way journey of a whole community progressing at the same speed and
along the same path. As the trope of the roundabout suggests,
contemporary Spain seems to function with a fluid social and cultural
circulation that allows movement from and to multiple directions. Yet,
as with a roundabout in which specific traffic norms and hierarchies
navigate flow, these narratives signal
