Almudena Grandes (Madrid, 1960-2021) has had an enduring literary career in books like The Ages of Lulu, The Ages of Lulu, and The Hard Airs, and in her historical epic, Episodes of an endless war you see today. Light five books of the six planned.
Regarding the fact that everything will get better, it should be said that it is not the first time that Grandes undertakes the task of constructing a fiction by framing the present and taking the pain of what he wants to tell. He had already shown signs of this in Los besos en el pan, a book with which the book reviewed here now has troubling associations. If it was the crisis that set the editing machine in motion in this one, it was the collateral damage caused by the pandemic. It is not easy to isolate from the presumed conditions that allowed the Madrid writer to write his book after his death, which he wrote at the worst moments of the health crisis and with the feeling that the end is very near for him. She actually couldn’t finish it, so Luis García Montero, her husband and director of the Cervantes Institute, was responsible for writing the final chapter, according to the Endnote.
Costume realism in a repetitive balance with a broad plot that draws countless characters, often women, struggling to keep their faith, is nothing more than a solid testimony to the imaginative representation of an entire era that de Grandes offers. to weight and struggle for a better gift in this book. As García Montero approves, it’s a gift that causes Grandes to interrupt “Episodes of an unending battle to write fiction that will address the tensions established between freedom and care.”
The country drawn here is Movimiento Ciudadano ¡Soluciones Ya! It is the land of a society in the hands of a technocrat named Grand Captain Francisco Martínez Sarmiento, who founded a political party called It is not inspired by any ideology, neither from the left, nor from the right, nor from the centre. We aim to come to power in the belief that it is possible to follow another policy, to run Spain with the efficiency, creativity and profitability criteria that define the management of excellent companies». And yet not so much the image of an ideal country that is being built as a dictatorship aimed at controlling the population with the help of virologists, vigilantes, hackers, therapists and a massive internet outage. the desire of an ever-repeated slogan: Everything will be better. But no, nothing gets better. In the literature of the Grandes there are always those who are here Camila Alcocer Hernández, Elisa Llorente Frías and Yénifer Mejía Flores, willing to show the true face of power and therefore fight for unwavering and unshakable ideals. The strength of Grandes writing in this novel lies in the fact that she tells a single story told from different points of view as (and there are many) as many characters as there are, and the unquestionable accuracy of some beings fighting tirelessly for a future life. imagined from the intrahistorical history of ideals that are evidence against totalitarianism and populism.