Prison Hell in Sara Mesa's cuatro por cuatro

Abstract

This paper analyses Sara Mesa's novel Cuatro por cuatro (2012) in the light of the postmodernist worldview and aesthetics, observing how the universal literary tradition and the most recent cinematographic tradition, as well as the social and anthropological thought of Foucault, Sartre and Canetti, converge and amalgamate in it. In its aesthetic minimalism and its singularity despite its borrowings and references, the novel explores the human condition through a microcosm set in the social and political reality of contemporary Spain. Artistic and philosophical allusions and allusions that are not always explicit radiate from the centre of the story in multiple directions, involving the reader in the construction of a novel worthy of unprecedented interpretations and developments.