Reviewing the first modern Spanish translation in 1969 (Franco had ruthlessly suppressed the Catalan language and literature), Mario Vargas Llosa hailed the epic's author as "the first of that lineage of God-supplanters--Fielding, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner--who try to create in their novels an all-encompassing reality."
Reviewing the first modern Spanish translation in 1969 (Franco had ruthlessly suppressed the Catalan language and literature), Mario Vargas Llosa hailed the epic's author as "the first of that lineage of God-supplanters--Fielding, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner--who try to create in their novels an all-encompassing reality."