Devastating criticism against Sonsoles Ónega’s novel, winner of Planeta: for being a woman?

“I’m looking forward to reading an equally implacable critique of the book by a laureate,” says the columnist. Luz Sánchez-Mellado in relation to the devastating review that his own newspaper publishes about The daughters of the Maid, the winning novel Planet Award, signed by the journalist Sonsoles Onega, Sánchez-Mellado also collaborates in whose program.

The dart of the columnist and talk show host, launched through her private Twitter account, suggests, beyond literality, that the fact that the author is a woman may have influenced the harshness of the criticism. Analyze what Luz says: “Without giving or subtracting reasons, because I have not read the work in question, I also tell you that I am looking forward to reading an equally implacable criticism of the book by a laureate.”

“Narrative aberrations”

The terrible criticism that Luz Sánchez-Mellado refers to and that El País disseminates is signed by Jordi Gracia García (Barcelona, ​​1965), essayist and Professor of Literature. The author of this missile in the form of an article (respectable, without a doubt) not only sinks the novel that won the best-paid award in the Spanish language but also charges against the members of the jury that award the Planet: “The narrative aberrations are continuous. The inconsistencies too. The capricious antics follow one another to delirious extremes,” reads the critic. “The effect left by this latest Planeta Award is devastating: it seems like an act of cultural transgression intrasystemic. Wonderful the capacity of The maid’s daughters for de-escalate downwards and without limit in the underground of the novel”, writes Jordi Gracia in the same newspaper in which Luz Sánchez-Mellado writes columns and back covers.

“Cosmic shame”

“As I read, sunk in misery and on the deck chair, I wondered if any of the jury members made the sacrifice of reading those 400 pages. Rosa Regàs or Carmen Posadas? Didn’t they feel a cosmic shame? What did the fine reader see Peter Gimferrer that has pushed your favorable vote? TO José Manuel Blecua Have not all the academic and non-academic demons taken away? What is the limit from which the reader of a jury is chloroformed or anesthetized in such a way that he renounces being who he is? “Says the author of the criticism.

“The feeling of ridicule is suffocating”

“The feeling of ridiculousness is suffocating. Because of the plot, because of the style, because of the prudery, because of the staleness, because of the simplicity, because of the arbitrariness, because of the absolute nothingness of a serial without even the category of serial,” he says before adding : “Someone has lost the nerve to reward a school essay of disturbing crudeness.”

Afterwards, he apologizes to the Planeta winner and journalist: “The popular presenter Sonsoles Ónega does not have the slightest responsibility in this calamity: she will have written the best novel she has ever known, as she has written and published many others,” she says in her article.

Jordi Gracia shoots at the seven members of the jury, whom he uses as “dereliction of duties”, and at the publisher, calling Planeta a “fraud so massive that it once again betrays the trust of a majority of Spaniards who want to read entertaining stories.” without necessarily navigating in moral and literary destitution”.