‘Everything Gets Better’, her dystopian posthumous novel, will be the last of the author who passed away a year ago. The writer instructed her widower, Luis García Montero, to finish the last chapter she was unable to finish.
Almudena Grandes (1960-2021) traveled to the future to tell us about our troubling and uncertain present in her latest literary adventure. ‘Everything gets better’ (Tusquets), the posthumous novel by the Madrid writer who died on November 27, is in bookstores on Tuesday. And it will be the last. Before the cancer cut his life short, he had nearly finished it, lacking the final chapter his widower, Luis García Montero, had sketched. In this dystopia, he tells how a successful businessman becomes the president of a Spain that is taken by surprise by a pandemic and a blackout and runs the country like a company “to lead it into an unbearable dictatorship”.
“It’s a sample of Almudena’s personality, which was not blindly optimistic and felt the need to maintain her beliefs,” her widower and director of the Cervantes Institute said when she presented her at the National Library this Monday. Populated by ‘hackers’, journalists, politicians, businessmen and ‘those bad people who wanted to be dazzling’, imagine a physical and democratic blackout. “Analyze what we were most afraid of in the present to face the future. And it really scares you to see the similarities with what is happening now, from the repression in Iran to the repression that the people of Shanghai are undergoing Garcia Montero added.
“Almudena was desperate to hear that the country would fix itself with a successful businessman, and the novel is born out of that anger,” said Juan Cerezo, Grandes editor for a quarter of a century and co-host of the book on the BNE yesterday. .
“It picks up the populist temptation to destroy the institutions and the politicians, but it is also a wake-up call for rulers to remember that if they distance themselves from the people, they could fall at any moment,” García said. Montero. . “He tells us how the Great Captain is pushing democracy from within,” said the author of an epilogue explaining how his wife instructed him to finish the final chapter according to his instructions.
“On April 1, 2020, Almudena, in full confinement, began taking notes. On May 7, she started writing it as a gift to herself on her 60th birthday, and on September 20, she received the bad news about cancer,” explains García Montero.
“What should have been a period of preparation for the novel was the way he clung to life despite illness,” said the poet and writer. “He wrote until a few weeks before his death, when we understood there was no way out. He had no strength and he gave me some suggestions to finish the novel. We read the notes in his notebooks together, discussed all the options, and he asked me to write down what was unfinished. She wanted her readers to know the end of the story she envisioned.”
«I didn’t want to write literature or fantasize, just follow his instructions. That is what I have tried to do in the last short chapter of this book. I hope I have not betrayed the love Almudena felt for her readers and her characters,” García Montero wished.
Therefore, neither he nor his publishers considered a double signature of what will be Grandes’ last novel. “There won’t be any more of Almudena,” her widower confirmed. To write it, he parked what should be the last of his “Episodes of an Endless War,” “Mariano en el Bidasoa,” a story about moles. “He had the notes and the documentation for the next and final delivery of his project to tell Spain from the Republic to democracy. But there was nothing else and we will have nothing else,” insisted her widower.
García Montero closed the act by sharing an emotional anecdote about the novel. «When the first copies came home, my daughter Elisa went to the civil cemetery and left one in Almudena’s grave. He told me he didn’t know if he was doing the right thing because someone might take it away. I told him I certainly did. That would be very nice. When I returned to the cemetery, I saw that the book was not there and that someone had left another book by Pablo Neruda in its place,” he said.
‘Everything is better’ is set in the first half of the 21st century, in a Spain that has become an ultra-capitalist dictatorship. The land is being transformed into a private company whose owners are the owners of the major Spanish companies. But in the novel, “there are also good opponents, because in their stories there was always resistance,” García Montero emphasized about a narration “which has a lot to do with the universe of Almudena.”
Her widower recalled how after the huge success of her first work, “The Ages of Lulu,” Grandes chose to become a writer rather than devote herself to becoming famous. He published ‘I’ll call you Friday’ and decided that his literary talent would serve ‘to connect people’s lives with history’.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
