Et was a scandal of the kind the industry loves, especially in Spain. It happened, of course, at the ceremony for the country’s most important literary prize. Author Carmen Mola, the youngest phenomenon on the Spanish book market, was to win the Planeta prize last year. Her first novel had been published three years earlier, followed by two more, hundreds of thousands of copies sold and it was a guess who this successful author who kept in secret was. She wrote crime novels, right down to the most brutal details. And she gave occasional interviews, but only via email. In it, she flirted with wanting to continue her normal life. And once she said that the answer as to who she really was would only disappoint anyway.
It wasn’t quite like that. The evening of the award ceremony came. And three men stepped onto the stage. It was not easy for everyone to find their bearings in their outrage afterwards. Was all this a sign that you could only be successful as a woman, too much emancipation, so to speak? Or is it the opposite? Who used whom (from)? Even if the explanation was actually obvious – the invented biography, Carmen Mola was a professor in her mid-40s, three children who wrote splatter novels in their free time, was simply promising from a marketing point of view – everything came back to negotiation: the male gaze.
The autonomy of female protagonists. The gender of book prize winners in the country (mostly male). The gender of the successful authors (2021 slightly more than half female). The question of the role of women in the Spanish literary scene. It is a question that has been regularly debated since the end of Francoism at the latest. Since the 1980s, women who write have repeatedly been described as a trend in contemporary Spanish literature. Especially young authors. It was like that in the 90’s and in the early 2000’s. It could be repeated now. That just makes less sense than ever. Which finding is actually true: the voices of women in Spain have been loud in recent years, far louder than in many other countries.
It’s them on the streets where a broad women’s movement has made itself heard, it’s them in other areas of the public sphere. And they are in fiction. Protagonists, female themes that did not take place before, female biographies that were hardly told. And the stories and experiences of the younger generation are currently being told primarily from a female point of view, it seems.
“The Miracles” by Elena Medel
So it is certainly no coincidence that one of the most remarkable current novels ends with one of the largest women’s demonstrations in recent Spanish history. It’s the moment when the paths of the two protagonists cross, they meet on the street in Madrid and don’t meet. It is a loud and very quiet moment at the same time, a missed and fulfilled, a poetic and very concrete moment, it reflects quite a lot of what “The Miracles” by Elena Medel (ad Spanish by Susanne Lange. Suhrkamp, 221 pages , 23 euros).
One of the most interesting new books from Spain
Source: Suhrkamp Verlag
There is Maria, who becomes pregnant as a young woman in the 1960s in the southern Spanish countryside. After the birth, the family sends her to Madrid without the child. She will work as a maid and later as a cleaning lady. Of course, nothing will come of the plans to catch up with the daughter. The village grows, bumpy paths become asphalt roads, the daughter becomes a mother. Poverty seems surmountable, at least for a moment, but in the end it is just as little as the accent that the women try to hide, including the granddaughter, who also eventually ends up in Madrid, in a small, shabby apartment, in precarious circumstances. Overwhelmed by life.
It is no longer, at least not primarily, male power structures that these women are helplessly confronted with. In fact, the men here are lost figures, even more helpless than the women, and – whether present or absent – just a sideshow. The main focus is on the social circumstances of a postal boom in Spain, in which, while other European countries are only just beginning to suspect this, the second generation soon no longer harbors any illusions that the promises of advancement made by the previous generation no longer apply to them.
“In the Middle of Summer” by Ana Iris Simón
The novel-autobiography “Mitten im Sommer” (ad Spanish by Svenja Becker. Hoffmann and Campe, 256 pages, 24 euros) revolves around this promise, which has caused quite a stir in Spain in recent months; it was written by the now 31-year-old Ana Iris Simón. For her, too, it’s about life that begins in villages, here in Castile, about that of her parents, about her own life plan and the doubts about it – and about disillusionment and disappointment. About demographic change, precarious working conditions, emigration from the country, core problems of current Spain that make many biographies fragile.
Ana Iris Simón: Mitten im Sommer
Source: HOFFMANN UND CAMPE VERLAG GmbH
However, not only did Ana Iris Simón draw attention to the fact that she describes and dissects a widespread attitude to life quite precisely, but also that she counters it with praise for family and life “in the past”, sometimes opposing progress and the supposed freedom it brought , turns – which made the author, apparently unexpected for her too, the darling of some conservatives and even the very right.
“So bold, so fearless” by Andrea Abreu
Far less political, although the social question also plays a role here, biographies are dealt with in another novel, which quite rightly became a surprise hit. In “So bold, so fearless” (from Spanish by Christiane Quandt. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 192 pages, 20 euros) by Andrea Abreu, born in Tenerife in 1995, two girls fight their way through the first phase of growing up. That’s not always nice – the novel begins with one of the girls throwing up very explicitly, intentionally. And the author describes it as vividly as possible. She will stick to this special poetics of orality and direct, drastic language.
And the scenery of the story is direct and drastic, the back room of the holiday catalog Canary Islands: a poor village in the north of Tenerife, not far, but far enough away from the sea for the girls to leave their bikinis on the dirty canal that runs through the place leads, need to run. Here are clouds instead of sun, believing grandmothers instead of helicopter parents, a lot of wasteland and a volcano threatening in its years of silence.
And it soon becomes clear that the initially comforting friendship between the two will also break out. It remains, that applies to all of the novels, questions that remain unanswered, thoughts that the reader has to think through to the end. And that’s good news, because it testifies not least to the self-confidence of this new type of fiction.