Thursday, March 28

The posthumous novel by Almudena Grandes in which Luis García Montero tried to write his last chapter


On May 7, 2020, Almudena Grandes gave herself for her 60th birthday to start writing what ended up being her last novel, Everything is going to get better. The work, which became his refuge, arrives in bookstores next Tuesday, October 11, from the Tusquets publishing house. The author, who died in November of last year, places in her text Spain in the near future where a new political party called ‘Movimiento Ciudadano ¡Soluciones Ya!’ sweeps the elections. His victory transforms the country into an ultra-capitalist dictatorship, a large private company ruled by the owners of the most powerful companies.

Almudena Grandes, first Favorite Daughter of Madrid

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The writer, who was distinguished as the first Favorite Daughter of Madrid at the beginning of 2022, passionately and lucidly describes this reality through numerous characters of different ages, professions, concerns and ideologies. The result is a profoundly up-to-date volume in which, above all else, as Luis García Montero stated in the presentation held this Monday at the National Library, “the protagonism is taken by the will to resist.” An event in which Aitana Sánchez Gijón, who has defined herself as “one of those thousands of readers who are left quite orphaned”, has read two excerpts from the volume.

From the poet’s handwriting sprang the chapter that closes Everything is going to get betterentitled The transition, as he himself explains in the heartbreaking epilogue included in the issue: “He lacked the strength to undertake it. During the last three weeks of his life, when death became a reality, he explained to me how he wanted to finish the novel, we read the annotations in his notebooks together, we talked about the possibilities and he asked me to write what was left unfinished. . She wanted her readers to know the ending of the story that she had imagined.” And so she did, or, as she acknowledges, she “tried” to do.

The director of the Cervantes Institute has explained that the impulse to carry out this book arose during confinement. Such was Grandes’ commitment that he decided to interrupt the play he was working on at the time, which would have been the last episode of his endless war. Text that will not be able to see the light, since by then it had only “begun to be documented. It was going to be a long-running mole story.” “There are some notes, but not the outlined novel,” García Montero shared. Grandes decided to respond to the pandemic, the state of alarm and the confinement “through literature”. Something that, as the poet has recalled, he had already done in 2008, when after the economic crisis he published The kisses on the bread.

crafting Everything is going to get better, which was initially going to be marked by the consequences of the health crisis caused by the coronavirus, collided with the worst news. On September 20, 2020, a medical examination revealed that the author had cancer. “What was the preparation of her novel in her notebooks became a kind of table on which to lean and cling to life,” said the professor. Thus, during the quarantine, at home they felt that “we lived with her characters. We said that we were living in the Madrid of 2040”.

Imagine the future to understand the present

“If to understand the present you have to remember the past, it is also convenient to imagine the future to analyze the present”, was the reflection that led the Madrilenian to want to focus on the future and compose this “imagined story about what could happen to us , examining the dangers we were experiencing.” In the novel, a businessman trembles when listening to his son tell the rest of his class by video call that in the pandemic he had learned that “we are all going to save ourselves together and we need to take care of ourselves.” Faced with this perspective, his father considers the devastating consequences that it could have for his companies if the world really advocated solidarity and care instead of profit.

From there is where Grandes is articulating dynamics that, as García Montero has warned, are not too far from what “we are seeing today”. For example, that the “need for confinement can lead to a dictatorship and that people who understand freedom as ‘every man for himself’ use it to do unscrupulous business.” But there is no intention to deprive society of breath. On the contrary, “in the face of the blind optimism that defends that ‘everything is going to get better’ and the cynical pessimism of ‘nothing can be fixed’; there is the character with convictions who defends his dignity. These are the people who hope that there will be a moment in history that blows in their favor.”

To tell it, people who have problems contacting their children intersect, love stories that become havens of hope and solidarity, security forces that struggle to maintain their work at the service of society despite a tendency to extreme right in her environment, a university professor, journalists and scientists who disappear and a long and nourished etcetera of diverse and rich profiles. Among them there is room for heroism that, as the poet has described, “is represented by a group of people that could be a neighborhood association.”



The writer has recognized that Grandes “was much more hopeful about things to come than the average”. “Reading the novel I felt something that the poet Ángel González said, that it is ‘important to learn to lose so as not to give up’. We do not write blind, but there is a need to maintain convictions so as not to give up and have the hope that despite the problems there may be a better alternative”, he has expressed, “if you lose you have to learn to draw conclusions to continue resisting” .

a royal alert

Another of the reflections expressed in the presentation of Everything is going to get better is that “the malaise had been brewing since before the pandemic, especially due to the efforts of strategists to discredit politics. We also see it with respect to justice and journalism.” Situations that the novel reveals and that for the poet are very serious because “they harm democracy.”

Juan Cerezo, director of the Tusquets publishing house, has pointed out that it is something that is evident in society when, in desperation, formulations such as “this would be fixed if a certain person took charge” are heard, without there necessarily having been a deep reflection about who is that figure. This is reflected in the book, in which for the publisher Grandes has had the “cunning to have two very attractive characters as enemies. He always said that to be good bad guys you have to be likeable.”

Along the same lines, the poet has spoken about the influence of Max Aub, one of the writer’s reference authors, because of how he stated that “sometimes we do not realize what is coming our way and we experience problems with a bit in a hurry, without being able to analyze them”. A way of behaving with and for the world that could lead to “suddenly some characters being involved in Nazi Germany saying ‘if they told me two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it’”. García Montero has argued that it is something that has been repeated “with the war that Putin has unleashed” and the pandemic: “Scientists have been announcing that something like this could happen for a long time.” “Imagination makes us aware of the problems we have”, he has valued to explain the importance of a novel like Everything is going to get better and its ability to push minds to do so.

The “clumsiness” of Martínez-Almeida

After the death of Grandes in November 2021, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and José Luis Martínez-Almeida refrained from showing their condolences publicly, receiving numerous criticisms from the followers of the author’s work. Reached January, the mayor of Madrid said in an interview that the writer “did not deserve to be the city’s Favorite Daughter”, but that she had agreed to give her recognition in exchange for agreeing on the Budgets with the unruly More Madrid “. Shortly after her statements were published, García Montero dismissed her words as “mean”. “She should treat us Madrid residents with more dignity,” she claimed.

The poet has assessed that at that time “the mayor messed up because they were unnecessary statements that later turned against him.” “Motivated a little by his own internal problems, he came out making some very unpleasant statements at the time of his death,” he lamented.

Alluding to his public position as director of the Cervantes Institute, he has maintained that it is “first of all democracy to know that the institutions belong to everyone”. In such a way that, in carrying out his work, “I respect both those who propose things to me with which I agree and those who do not”. In any case, he assures: “I have no interest in talking to him.” “I appreciate the number of people who have shown their love for Almudena”, he concluded.





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