Payasos en la lavadora

infobox Book |
name = Payasos en la lavadora
title_orig = Payasos en la lavadora
translator = "not known in english"


image_caption =
author = Álex de la Iglesia
cover_artist =
country = Spain
language = Spanish
series =
genre = Satirical, Novel
publisher = Planeta
release_date = 1997
media_type = Print (Hardback)
pages =
isbn = ISBN 84-08-02080-3
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Payasos en la lavadora" ("Clowns in the Washing Machine") is a humorous novel written in Spanish by 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's found a laptop computer lost by poet Juan Carlos Satrústegui. On it, he's 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's a parody of the old literary technique of the false document found by chance, probably influenced by the fact that, in real life, Álex de la Iglesia writes his film scripts on a laptop computer, which he's lost at least twice.

According to this introduction, the restin fifteen chapters are Juan Carlos Satrústegui's autobiographic tale. Satrústegui considers himself a genius, superior over all those he comes across. But we soon realise his psychic problems (obsessions, deliria, paranoia, lack of empathy...) which get 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 of 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.