Rating
Creator: Alberto Barrera Tyszka
Title: Rating
Publisher: Editorial Anagrama
Date: 2011
Language: Spanish
Description: How far is television willing to go in its desperate pursuit of ratings? This question seems to permeate every page of this novel. Rating explores the moral boundaries of the harsh world of reality television while delving deep into the inner workings of the successful Latin American telenovela industry. The novel alternates—and ultimately fuses—the voices of Manuel Izquierdo, a screenwriter in the throes of a midlife crisis who, after two decades of writing television melodramas, has grown cynical and disillusioned, and Pablo Manzanares, a literature student aspiring to become a poet who has landed a minor job at a TV channel. Through the words and intersecting experiences of these two characters, Barrera Tyszka constructs a single narrative that evolves into a unified voice, even experimenting with a syntax that mimics the chaotic rhetoric of television. Alberto Barrera Tyszka once again surprises us with a brisk, at times dizzying prose style, yet one also rich in reflection and literary insight. With a narrative full of humor and irreverence, Rating offers a sharp and multifaceted critique of television, while also exposing the internal mechanisms of the telenovela—an industry responsible for shaping the sentimental education of a continent and for turning melodrama into an export commodity. With this new novel, Alberto Barrera Tyszka fulfills the high expectations set by The Sickness (La enfermedad, winner of the Herralde Prize for Novel), which received extraordinary reviews in Spain and Latin America and was a finalist for both the Prix Fémina in France and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom. It also won the Popular Chinese Literature Publishing House Prize for Best Spanish-Language Novel in 2007. "From his cynicism and skepticism arise the book’s finest and most original aspects: the abundant observations on soap operas and the world of television, with its relentless rules and its obsession with ratings—a world the reader experiences page by page, drawn in by its corrosive, delirious, and melancholic humor.” —J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia Anagrama https://www.anagrama-ed.es/libro/narrativas-hispanicas/rating/9788433972347/NH_492
Subject: Television broadcasting, Reality television programs, Television soap operas, Literature and morals, Moral conditions, , Television programs--Rating
Type: Text
Format: Printed book
Rights: External resource
Relation:
Review by René Llatas Trejo on Medium
Summary in English on Venezuelan Literature UK
WorldCat Record
Identifier: OCLC: 992087253 | ISBN: 9788433933195
Collection: Narrative fiction
Tags: Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Contemporary Venezuelan novel, Manipulation, Morality, Rating, Reality TV, Soap operas, Televisa, TV shows
Citation: Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Rating, Editorial Anagrama, 2011, OCLC: 992087253 | ISBN: 9788433933195, accessed September 22, 2026, https://archivovenezuela.com/en/items/show/1044