It is difficult to have an overall opinion of a book which is actually 9 very different texts from 1997 up to 2013.
I knew this author and his work through a former lover,back in 1998 or 1999. I couldn't remember with accuracy. That love relationship was one of my worst experiences with humans, but as in any bad, even terrible experience, there is always a bright side of it. His cruelty was as powerful as his love, and somehow Rodrigo García's work is completely mingled with those old love memories: García is cruel, devastating some times; in him there is some love, or the intensity of two human bodies crashing, some others.
I can't read García without that love's weight on my back. When García writings get closer to that old, suprising Notas de cocina of my memory, is like living again in that burning relationship: the calculated cruelty is somehow mitigated now for the distance and the literature, but the sound of the violence is still there, powerful, funny in some ways.
When García's texts move away from that style, then the result is blander, even boring. That is not necessarily related with time. Older texts, what should be closer in style to Accidens or Notas de Cocina, do not share the vivacity that shocked me and opened a new universe for me fifteen years ago, but I could find it in the latest.
However, there is something grand going on in some of the texts, like a seriousness, or even worse, gravity. In general, indeed, everything is still a big joke. But sadness come through. Sadness that some times is just a tedious enumeration of meaningless words, but others is density and peace: the two last pages of Gólgota Picnic are, to me, a good example of this, of how to finish a play exactly where you have to be at the end: the highest point, just before the fall.
One more comment: in this book there is included also a short text, rather a lecture. It is not exactly a play, but it could be. El mensajero de Asturias is one of the best praises of freedom that I have read recently, and a message of freedom that stands up in front of those who share our same boat. Because it is easy to mock those who live in the opposite side of the town; it is easy to scoff racists, or homophobes. But what happen when your friend, who apparently shares your backpack of values, decides to join a group and boycott a play, or a theatre, or a writer's lecture? What happen when the hunt is launched, and a guy is bullied, insulted and isolated for what he did — beyond the legal responsibilities of his acts? What happen when a politician takes the decision that she thinks appropriate, and vote for something that other people disagree, and she is bullied, spitted, booed or harassed by our friends?