Jeremy Lybarger
Stories on the verge of a ponderous letdown:
Pedro Almodóvar forays into fiction.
The Last Dream, by Pedro Almodóvar, translated by Frank Wynne, HarperVia, 216 pages, $26
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Few great filmmakers are also great writers. Film is delusion by committee, while writing, like suicide, is a private gamble. Also, scriptwriting isn’t a transferrable science. Scripts are mechanical and blunt, closer to a police report than a novel’s lyrical tremors. There are exceptions. But for every Pasolini or Tarkovsky comes the soggy rebuttal of Gus Van Sant or Harmony Korine, directors whose books are but muddled footnotes to their day jobs. Filmmakers are a particularly sorry bunch when it comes to writing fiction. Perhaps only Kenneth Anger’s strain of docugossip in Hollywood Babylon achieves a corrosive charm proportional to its inventiveness. It’s almost as if writing good fiction weren’t a matter of logistics—plot, dialogue, pacing—but of something intangible and ingrown. Maybe talent is the word I’m looking for.
The Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has no doubts about his own literary calling. “I have known that I was a writer since I was a boy,” he notes in the introduction to The Last Dream, a collection of a dozen short stories, translated by Frank Wynne. Some of these tales date back to the late 1960s, when Almodóvar had just graduated high school and still lived with his parents in the baked provinces of western Spain. The most recent was written last year. As Almodóvar recounts, his assistant, Lola, exhumed the dusty manuscripts and insisted, inexplicably, that he reread them. He thought highly enough of his forsaken juvenilia to want to charge money for it.
It all makes for enticing jacket copy. Since his debut feature in 1980, Almodóvar has been a reliably charismatic filmmaker, a queer auteur whose early movies are partial to screwball froth and louche sexuality, and who, in the last half-decade, has nearly perfected a certain register of stylized melodrama. If any contemporary director could write fiction worth your adrenaline, it would be Almodóvar. But, alas: the enfant terrible turns out to be a holy bore. And like other artists besotted with their navels, he’s mistaken about the pleasures of his own company.
The Last Dream hoodwinks from the start. An epigraph from Colm Tóibín’s 2021 novel The Magician implies the stories will be, at least in part, erotic confessions. The last sentence of Tóibín’s quote is: “Not to have registered in his diary the message sent by the secret energy in a gaze would have been unthinkable.” Turn the page, though, and Almodóvar himself asserts that he’s never kept a diary. “This collection of stories . . . demonstrates the intimate relationship between what I write, what I film, and what I live,” he explains. And so it turns out the book will be short on eros and long on ego—a spelunk into his creative well. (Inevitably, the cover is a photograph of Almodóvar.) This wouldn’t be so tiresome if he were capable of eking jazz from his inspirations, which he cites as: the courtyards of La Mancha, where he grew up; the “explosive and utterly free” nightlife in Madrid between 1977 and 1990; and the “tenebrous religious education” he received from the Salesian brothers in the early 1960s. Of this threesome, only Catholicism seems to have reported for duty at Almodóvar’s desk.
A quarter of these pieces feature religion, not just as background color but as the scaffolding for Almodóvar’s fables. In “The Visit,” later adapted into the film Bad Education, a scandalously underdressed woman terrorizes the headmaster of a religious boys’ school by reading aloud what she claims are her late brother’s memoirs of being molested by priests. At one point, the brother’s testimony veers into camp: “The monks sat around the long table like the apostles at the Last Supper. I was even more stunned by another idiosyncrasy in their appearance: the monks were wearing stunning cocktail dresses.” The story ends with a twist that any sentient reader will clock two paragraphs away.
“The Visit” hints at a kind of telenovela sacrilegiousness, but Almodóvar’s other forays into pious themes play it straight(er). “The Mirror Ceremony”—in which an unnamed Count (obviously Dracula) arrives at a secluded monastery, ready to renounce all earthly pleasures—is a gothic pastiche that’s neither ironic nor absurdist enough to subvert its pedigree. There are whiffs of almost-wit, as when the Count can tolerate sunlight only because he applies a “solid layer of moisturizer,” but they read like accidents rather than technique. Worse, the prose, at least in Wynne’s translation, is flat enough to sleep on. Clichés drone throughout: “pitch dark,” “hard as stone,” “dark as blackest night,” “light as a feather.” Descriptions deflate into self-contradiction: the Count’s gaze is “shimmering and opaque, heavy as metal.” Almodóvar reprises the same story-within-a-story gimmick that he uses in “The Visit,” this time to clunkier effect. You finish this little vampire sedative craving a hit of Anne Rice, who at least had the decency to be entertaining.
Things get more ponderous in “Redemption,” in which Almodóvar retells the story of Christ’s trial and crucifixion. The coy homoeroticism here is like the scum on microwaved milk: fragile and irritating. What’s the point of rehashing Bible lessons if the thief Barabbas doesn’t sodomize Christ like rough trade should? Almodóvar offers a sentimental deux ex machina in place of Christianity’s hammiest death. By contrast, “Joanna, the Beautiful Madwoman” chronicles the throttled reign of Joanna of Castile and her doomed husband, Philip the Handsome. While Almodóvar bases the tale on historical monarchs, he contrives a morbid flourish—Joanna keeps incredulous vigil beside Philip’s corpse—that inches the narrative toward the sublime irrationality he calls characteristically Spanish.
What of his other inspiration, those rambunctious Madrid nights? Almodóvar’s modern stories are breezy enough to warrant Dramamine. “Confessions of a Sex Symbol” is a picaresque narrated by a drug-addled porn actress; “Bitter Christmas” is a caper that follows an adman’s quest for anti-anxiety meds, culminating in an elegiac “thesis” on the Mexican chanteuse Chavela Vargas, Almodóvar’s real-life muse. Both recall the occasional manic stamina of Almodóvar’s early films, as well as their earthy wit: “The Prosperidad Neighborhood Association was organizing a local bazaar and wanted to offer me as a prize to the winner of the sack race,” the porn actress quips in “Confessions.” But both stories are also zero calorie. They go down easy and don’t leave a trace.
The book gropes toward promise in the four autobiographical vignettes featuring Almodóvar, or a narrator closely modeled on him. “The Last Dream” ruminates on his mother’s death, and although Almodóvar rates the story highly (“these five pages are among the best I have so far written”), its adequacy is attributable to its brevity and directness rather than any literary prowess. “Adios, Volcano,” another homage to Vargas, suggests that Almodóvar’s real competence lies in writing crónicas, that uniquely Latin American genre of observational essay-yarn. This impression is confirmed by the episodic “Memory of an Empty Day,” a digressive faux-diary. Despite some insipid lines—“New York is a city of continual reinvention”—there are also poignant reflections on Almodóvar’s isolation and boredom. In “A Bad Novel,” the collection’s closer, Almodóvar theorizes about writing itself. “A bad novel is something I could write,” he declares. These stories are proof.
Jeremy Lybarger is the features editor at the Poetry Foundation. He has written for the New Yorker, Art in America, the Paris Review, the Baffler, the Nation, and more.