Payasos en la lavadora
Payasos en la lavadora ("Clowns in the Washing Machine") is a humorous novel written in Spanish by the Spanish Basque film maker Álex de la Iglesia in 1997. It tells the experiences of a bohemian writer during Bilbao's Main Week fiestas. Plot summary. Álex de la Iglesia signs only two pages of this novel. In this introduction he states he has found a laptop computer lost by the poet Juan Carlos Satrústegui. On it, he has read a file called "Payasos en la lavadora". Since Satrústegui has entered a mental sanatorium, de la Iglesia talks  with the writer's mother and decides to publish the text after correcting it. It is a parody of the old literary technique of the false document found by chance, probably influenced by the fact that, in real life, de la Iglesia writes his film scripts on a laptop computer, which he has lost at least twice. According to this introduction, the rest of the fifteen chapters are Juan Carlos Satrústegui's autobiographical tale. Satrústegui considers himself a genius, superior to all those he comes across. But the reader soon realises his psychic problems (obsessions, deliria, paranoia, lack of empathy ) become worse due to the drugs he uses in fiestas, the want of slept and the beatings he earns when dealing with the lumpen. Allusions/references to other works. The novel is full of references to popular culture (the very title is about a Spanish TV commercial advertisement for machine soap) and philosophy, with strong contrasts between a literary and grandiloquent language and a rude and crude one, depending on Satrústegui's unstable moods.