Juan Benet is sometimes called the Proust of Spain, sometimes the Faulkner. Neither label is correct. He is best described as the Juan Benet of Spain, the most imposing, challenging and radically intransigent novelist writing in Spanish (or perhaps in any language) today.

"A Meditation" may be the most demanding novel I've ever read….

What really binds this almost unimaginably dense novel together is not Benet's sense of character or of scene but his brilliant, overarching and fascinatingly difficult style…. His figures of speech are so elaborated and extended that it's easy to forget what they are illustrating. You must struggle with the text, rereading sentence after sentence, many of which could be called, depending on your point of view, acts of literary defiance, slaps in the reader's face or brilliant inquisitions. (p. 13)

Unlike novelists who attempt to interpret the world around them, Benet has created his own...