“The Ages of Lulu” was a huge success and a scandal. Then he devoted all his energy to dealing with Francoism. The posthumous novel: a dystopia inspired by the pandemic
“I’ve had to write very complicated articles all my life. Nobody like this ». Thus began, on 10 October last in the newspaper «El País», the touching and courageous text with which the Spanish writer Almudena Grandes he had made his illness public. A cancer, which had been diagnosed a little over a year earlier, “a cancer – she wrote – which is a disease like any other, certainly an apprenticeship, but never a curse, nor a shame, nor a punishment”. A cancer that Saturday, November 28, in Madrid in which she was born on May 7, 1960, took her away.
“We lose one of the leading writers of our time” the premier immediately spoke on Twitter Pedro Sanchez. “Spanish literature and progressives are in mourning,” added Minister of Culture Miquel Iceta. “Almudena Grandes has masterfully portrayed our recent history and gave a voice to those who had never had it”, recalled theCervantes Institute, directed by the writer’s husband, the poet Luis Garcia Montero who has dedicated more than one of his collections to her.
Civil passion and stylistic qualities, an enveloping, fluvial writing capable of merging invention and historical facts. Almudena Grandes was all this, a literary and at the same time popular author, capable of embarking on a path that from her erotic onset with The ages of Lulu, in 1989, took her to cross the Spanish twentieth century. To become a voice at the service of memory, of the reworking of the dark years of Francoism, narrator of the “losers” for whom, as “El País” pointed out yesterday, she was able to construct “an epic”. “My grandfather – said the writer herself in an interview with the Corriere in 2016 – did not go to university, but possessed wealth that we have lost: the culture of poverty and the dignity of not being wealthy”. And again, of his novel Kisses on the bread, which came out the year before, said: “I’d like it to be read just as a vindication of the original one culture of poverty».
Graduated in History and Geography at the Complutense University of Madrid, Grandes achieved notoriety at the age of 28 with The ages of Lulu, from which the director Bigas Luna drew the film of the same name with Francesca Neri. “I have published Almudena Grandes since that debut, which would later become a symbol of post-Francoist Spain”, testifies Luigi Brioschi, president of Guanda, publisher of all the author’s Italian titles.
Then came other successful novels, such as Malena, a tango name (1994), Human geography atlas (1998), The difficult years
(2002), Too much love (2004), until, in 2007 with Heart of ice what can be considered his first political novel was released, in which he recounted the passion between the daughter of republican exiles and a young heir of a wealthy businessman who made his fortune under Francoism. “A good part of his narrative work – continues Brioschi – and perhaps the best, Almudena Grandes has dedicated it to a lucid and determined confrontation with the past, with the never-ending war. At the service of this enterprise he put his extraordinary creative wealth, his formidable means of expression. For all of us, I add, she was a great friend ».
It dates back to 2010 the grandiose project of the
“Episodes of an interminable war”: a series that includes six novels in which to narrate Spain from the 1940s to the 1960s, combining great history and that of individuals, recovering real-life figures that had been hidden, obscured. «This series – Grandes said in an interview with“ El País ”- brought me back to what I was. It showed me, many years after my graduation, how important what I studied was. I probably wouldn’t have thought about the “Episodes” if I hadn’t been a historian ».
The writer has completed five of the six books. The first, in 2010, was Agnes and joy
, which they followed The boy who read Verne
(2012), The three weddings of Manolita (2014), Dr. García’s patients (2017), The ideal daughter
(2020). With the latter, we arrive at the period from 1954 to 1956: a phase of Spain that Almudena Grandes decides to narrate through an original, lateral and perhaps for this reason even more authentic point of view: life in psychiatric hospitals during Francoism. And to do so through a terrible and real news case, that of Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira: a rich, cultured, intelligent woman who killed her only daughter Hildegart, a child prodigy, when she reached eighteen. In an interview with «la Lettura» on 19 July 2020, the author herself explained her method: «Through the internment of Donna Aurora, I tell the suffocating cloak of silence and fear that had also fallen on Spain. I tell a story inside a real asylum, in a country that had itself become a madhouse ».
In that interview, which took place after the first long phase of the lockdown due to the pandemic, the author told of having lived the confinement in Madrid and that that experience had inspired another novel. A storyline that she was already writing and that had prompted her to take a break from the historical series. «The new book – he had anticipated – is linked to the pandemic. In the center there are a dictatorship and resistance to this dictatorship, but in the near future. I have already written about eighty pages ». It is his posthumous novel, as the Spanish publisher confirmed yesterday talking about one “Dystopia”. Precisely in the article in “El País” in which she announced the illness, the author herself apologized for any future absences and silences. Then he explained: “My readers, who know me well, know that they are very important to me. Whenever I am asked about them, I answer the same thing, that they are my freedom, because thanks to them I can write the books I want, and not the ones that others expect. They also know that writing is my life, and it has never been more, or more intensely, than now. During this phase I wrote a novel that kept me whole and represented a purpose for the future that helped me as much as it heals. Now I need to give back to the book all that he gave me, shut myself up with him, pamper him, finish it, correct it ».
Tenacious to the last, she fought: “My favorite characters are the survivors and I have no intention of disappointing myself,” she wrote again. A commitment and a strength that Almudena Grandes did not express only in books. In 2010 he was with Pedro Almodóvar among whom defended judge Baltasar Garzón, accused of having opened an investigation into the crimes amnestied by Francoism. Always progressive, “at different times I voted for both the socialists and Podemos”, he told “la Lettura”: “There were phases in which I would not have chosen the PSOE, but I appreciate Sánchez and I liked Zapatero”. He also fought for migrants, women. Feminism, he said to our supplement, “today and forever, is the struggle of women for equality. We understood that the legal one is not the same as the real one, which is why the battle must continue ».
November 27, 2021 (change November 28, 2021 | 01:15)
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