Playing with Subversive Spaces in Lluís Maria Todó's El juego del mentiroso and El mal francés.

In El juego del mentiroso and El mal francés, Catalan author Lluís Maria Todó creates a dialogue about the physical and symbolic spaces that his homosexual male protagonists inhabit during the years of Franco's dictatorship and the subsequent Transition. The main characters in Todó's aforementioned novels are gay men who seek to understand their identities and their place in relation to—or in rebellion against—heteronormative society through a literary and physical exploration of the spaces they inhabit. With reference to spacial theory by Fredric Jameson and Michel de Certeau, as well as Johan Huzinga's play theory, this paper proposes an exploration of how the author's textual games (including metafiction, intertextuality, and gay autobiography) and the games played out by the protagonists attempt to create a subversive space for homosexual culture and identity within the larger patriarchal social context. Todó examines the ways in which his protagonists navigate various spaces, presenting those spaces as loci of power that the characters' identities either subvert or are shaped by, leading to a contemplation of the significance of the spaces that the protagonists ultimately create or inhabit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]