Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, 88; Spanish Writer

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, a major figure in Spanish contemporary literature whose novels blended realism with fantasy, died Wednesday. He was 88.

Torrente Ballester was found dead after a heart attack at his home in the central city of Salamanca, Spain’s national radio reported. He had a history of heart trouble in recent years.

Torrente Ballester was admired for his ironic manner and an ability to combine realism and fantasy in his writing. He won the 1985 Cervantes Prize for Literature--considered by many the most important literary award in the Spanish-speaking world.

“I carry on writing novels,” he once said, “because it is the only thing that I know how to do and because I need to do it.”

Born in the northwestern port town of El Ferrol, Torrente Ballester received a degree in philosophy from the University of Santiago de Compostela. He began his career as a drama critic in the 1940s.

Torrente Ballester wrote more than 30 novels. He published his first novel, “Javier Marino,” in 1943, and his last, “Los Anos Indecisos” (The Indecisive Years), a year ago.

His importance as a novelist was established with his 1972 novel “La Saga / Fuga de J.B” (The Legend / Flight of J.B.). The book is viewed by many as Torrente Ballester’s masterpiece.

“[It is] a very revolutionary novel with lots of characters and [is] a parody of his structuralist critics. It is really funny, written in magic realism,” said Gonzalo Sobejano, professor of Spanish literature at Columbia University.

Mass popularity came around the same time, when Spanish television serialized his trilogy “Los Gozos y Las Sombras” (The Delights and the Shadows), set in his native northwestern region of Galicia and written 20 years earlier.

For much of his life, Torrente Ballester combined writing with teaching literature at the university level, including two years at New York University at Albany. He regularly backed up the stylistic choices in his novels with academic arguments.

“Logic may be an expression of an intellectual need, but flights of fancy and the absurd are all needs, intellectual needs,” he wrote in the prologue to his 1983 novel “La Princesa Durmienta va a La Escuela” (The Sleeping Princess Goes to School).

According to Sobejano, Torrente Ballester’s political views were originally very conservative.

“He belonged to the Falange, the movement that supported Francisco Franco,” Sobejano said, “but he abandoned those policies in the ‘50s.”

Torrente Ballester acknowledged in a recent interview that he was “filled with the prejudices of my epoch,” an apparent reference to the years before and after the 1939-75 dictatorship of the late Gen. Franco.

The author was married twice and has 11 children. He was to be buried in El Ferrol on Friday.