In the long or short distance, Eduardo Mendoza, who receives the Princess of Asturias award, is the extraterrestrial that Spanish literature has not deserved for at least 50 years, when without expecting anything at all he published in Seix Barral and in 1975 The truth about the Savolta case from the hand of his friend Pere Gimferrer: it is a novel full of antics, melodramas, murders, corruptions, press clippings, summary clippings, journalists and sentimental disasters (more or less like now). Well, not exactly, because this man must have been born with the half smile on top, perched on top of the mustache that he must have sported as a child, as he does now too, but darker and with a kind of placidity of a British and contemplative lord without pretensions and without fear of almost anything.
