The diary of a failed Spanish capitalist: Individualism and the ambivalent critique of Pablo Sánchez's El alquiler del mundo (2010)

Pablo Sánchez's recent novel, El alquiler del mundo (which won the first-ever Francisco Casavella Prize in 2010), is not a story of corporate triumph but rather a cautionary tale foregrounding the dangers of capitalist excess. Written from a largely first-person point of view, the novel affords us a clear picture-at some times sad, at others humorous-of the sequence of events leading to the author's ultimate realization that 'Barcelona, sin duda, ha sido un fracaso' (311). What makes the novel so intriguing is its rich caricature of the failure of a middle-class social climber and its substantial mobilization of key cultural intertexts to achieve its effect-in particular, references to author-poet César Vallejo. Privileging Vallejo-and relying on the capitalist critiques of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre-in an analysis of Sánchez's novel reveals that El alquiler del mundo advances a surprisingly ambivalent perspective on the current capitalist system, an ambiguity that is not convincingly vitiated by its choice of a first-person narrative structure.