Un polaco en la corte del Rey Juan Carlos.

Gerling, David Ross

The influence of the United States on the latest work by Manuel Vazquez Montalban goes deeper than the superficial parallel between the title of his novel Un polaco en la corte del Rey Juan Carlos and that of Mark Twain's classic, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Well before he informs us offhandedly on page 143 that he lived in the United States during the Watergate period, it becomes clear that the author/journalist Vazquez Montalban has appropriated the sociopolitical model of the United States in order to tell his story of present-day Spain.

As one might expect, the social and political reality of present-day Spain revolves around the replacement of the Spanish Workers Socialist Party (PSOE) of ex-President Felipe Gonzalez by the Popular Party (PP) of newly elected President Jose Maria Aznar. It is this dramatic shift from the left of center to the right of center that prompts Vazquez Montalban, who refers to himself good-humoredly as a polaco (slang for catalan), to seek an audience at the court of King Juan Carlos I in order to find out firsthand how this change will affect the ordinary Spaniard.

Since the Spanish constitution disallows anything that could be perceived even remotely as criticism or mockery of the king, Vazquez Montalban avoids describing his supposed meeting with his monarch and instead relates everything else that took place during his long sojourn in Madrid while awaiting the regal encounter. Using a mixture of gossip gleaned from such magazines as !Hola!, novelistic invention, and of course his own investigative reporting, Vazquez Montalban speaks freely, lucidly, and, where possible, humorously about the two sociopolitical topics that interest him most: the movida and the reason why, after three terms in power, Felipe Gonzalez and the socialists, in the author's words, finally "screwed up."

The author cites Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and Newsweek to authenticate the movida, that postmodern phenomenon whereby Madrid, during the first half of the 1980s, was the undisputed cultural and night-life capital of the world. In his opinion, the movida was the brainchild of the socialists that made art, in all its conceivable and uncensored forms, accessible to everyone for the first time in Spanish history. To explain the ultimate demise of the socialists, Vazquez Montalban incorporates a dialogue between himself and Monsignor Elias Yanes, president of the Conference of Spanish Bishops. While neither the author nor the monsignor favors the conservative PP, they nevertheless attribute Spain's disillusionment with the socialists to the latter group's inexperience as democratically elected officials. In a lighter vein, the author traces the beginning of the end of the socialists to a protracted meeting between then-President Felipe Gonzalez and the singer Julio Iglesias, arguing that anyone capable of sustaining a two-hour conversation with Julio has to be out of touch with reality.

By means of numerous parallel references to politics in the United States, Vazquez Montalban accomplishes two things in Un polaco en la corte del Rey Juan Carlos: he gives his intended Spanish audience a fresh look at their country through a political prism made in the USA, and, inadvertently, he elucidates the normally confusing Spanish political system for North American readers.

David Ross Gerling Sam Houston State University