Juan Benet has been called the Spanish Proust. He is one of Spain's most important and controversial modernists. His style, strongly influenced by Central and South American writers, has in turn influenced the post-Franco generation. A Meditation is the second novel in a trilogy and the first to be translated into English…. It contains echoes of Faulkner and Hardy, as well as the clear footprints of Mr. Proust. It is crammed with references to Plato, Nietzsche, Kafka, Rilke, Schopenhauer, and the Bible.

It has no paragraphs. It has sentences that sometimes run on for a couple of pages, full of digressions in dashes and parentheses, then digressions inside the digressions, and negatives, then double negatives, qualifying the original (if you can find it) premise. It is written in language which is usually left alone in the dictionary and which sounds, frequently, like this: "Not even in the spacious...