“We need to shut with bolts, keys and locks all the doorways through which the spirit of Spain escapes and spills over into the four points of the horizon,” pleaded the 19th-century Spanish novelist Angel Ganivet. He knew whereof he spoke: Ganivet spent the last six years of his brief life in Antwerp, Helsinki, and Riga, where he committed suicide at the age of 33. He was not exactly in exile — he lived in those cities as a diplomat representing the Spanish government — yet Ganivet’s compulsion to leave his native country made him typical of Spanish writers, intellectuals, and scientists throughout the centuries. “In other nations, the people arrive,” Henry Kamen writes in “The Disinherited” (Harper, 508 pages, $34.95), his encyclopedic new study; “in Spain they depart.”

What makes Ganivet’s plight still more emblematic is that, even after he left Spain, he found that Spain had by no means left him. “The central motif of my ideas,” he insisted, “is restoration of the spiritual life of Spain.” Like so many exiles of all nations, voluntary and involuntary, he found that his native country preyed on him like a riddle. “Wherever we care to pass over the roads of Spain,” Ganivet wrote, “we will encounter the eternal sphinx with the eternal question: is it better to live as we have done till now, or should we break definitively with bad traditions and transform ourselves into a modern nation?”