The emotion has been put by the actress Aitana Sánchez-Gijón when reading two fragments of the dystopian posthumous novel by Almudena Grandes, Everything is going to improve (Tusquets), and getting excited to the point that the press gathered at the National Library for the presentation has I was about to applaud her to give her time to recover. “Sorry. I’m going, I’m going, thank you”, she has stopped the applause. The extensive explanations about this anticipatory novel that portrays a future and close dictatorship and a resistance made up of neighbors rather than heroes, and all in times of pandemics, have been provided by the widower of Grandes, the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, who has shaped the last chapter of the work, for which Grandes lacked strength.
And that he has remembered how his wife began writing the novel as a reaction to the pandemic and the current political and freedom crises. And how in the process she was diagnosed with the cancer that would end her life and “the preparation of the novel became a table on which to lean and cling to life to maintain the discipline of the disease and the treatments.”
García Montero explained in an act with the press at the National Library that Grandes “was preparing the last episode of his series An endless war, Mariano in the Bidasoa, when the pandemic, the state of alarm, the confinement occurred, and she decided respond through literature, which is what we writers have in the face of the helplessness of life. He already did it in the 2008 crisis with Los besos en el pan”.
“In his notebook there is an entry on April 1, in which he says ‘so many days of pandemic and state of alarm, I am going to start taking notes locked up at home to prepare a novel’. Then on September 20 in a medical examination they gave him the bad news that he had cancer. He was writing Everything is going to get better until a few weeks before, when little by little we began to understand that there was no way out, he was losing strength, every day he was a little worse. He stayed in the last chapter and in a conversation he told me: ‘I don’t have the strength to write it, but I want the readers to see the ending I had in mind'”, explains the poet.
And he says that “we saw the notebooks together, the notes. He asked me for the novel to appear in Tusquets, a publishing house to which he has had strict loyalty even though they had offered him great prizes. And with the information and ideas he gave me, he wanted me to write the I have done it without wanting to write literature, following her instructions, with which I wanted to close the experience of the characters. Then I have written an epilogue explaining how far Almudena had come and what she had told me for that last chapter”.
García Montero, who recalled that with Almudena they ended up living at home at the time he was portraying, whether it was Madrid in the 1940s or, in this case, in the next decade, in the 1930s, so that his characters for him and his children “become almost companions in everyday life”, he has said that it is a novel “that has a lot to do with the world of Almudena”.
“With The Ages of Lulú she had a great success. She became a regular on television programs, talk shows, the radio. And she asked herself what she wanted to be, a writer or famous, and decided that she would be a writer. That is why her second novel, Te I will call Friday, it is the most complex and difficult to read, because she wanted to be a writer. She opted to use literature in a tradition that served to learn about people’s lives in the midst of history. History is an inevitable social framework, it feeds our sentimental education, our customs. More than speaking in the abstract of historical situations, he was interested in embodying literature in experiences of love, of relationships between a mother and a child, making history the territory of everyday life”, reflects García Montero.
And he remarks that “when he begins to write the Episodes of an endless war it is after The frozen heart. He wanted to analyze the past. He felt more strongly that to understand the present the past that we inherit is fundamental. He said that he began to become aware remembering a her mother’s conversation with her grandmother. The mother told her that her grandmother saw Josephine Baker dance naked in a theater in Madrid. And Almudena thought that her grandmother saw it and her mother, on the other hand, would not have been able to”.
“He understood – he concludes – that his mother’s Spain was very different from that of his grandmother and that all the effort for freedom that floated in novels such as The Ages of Lulú was to recover the republican Spain of his grandmother, cut short by the civil war. And I think that in this novel he does the opposite operation. If to understand the present you have to remember the past, it is also convenient to imagine the future to analyze the present. That is why he made this kind of imagined story of what could happen in a world, and in a country, Spain, where the pandemic had surprised us. And analyze the dangers we are experiencing”.
“The novel begins because a great businessman, turned into the reference, sees that his son is taking classes online. The teacher asks him what the pandemic has taught him, and the boy repeats the phrase that floated in the environment at the time of the applause for the toilets on the balconies and the police bringing food to the trapped elderly: ‘I have learned that we are going to save ourselves but all together and we need to take care of each other’ The father is frightened: ‘In a world with the solidarity of all together, what will become of my companies?’. And it sets in motion a process that are problems that we can have today”.
A process in which a new political party called Movimiento Ciudadano ¡Soluciones ya! sweeps the elections led in the shadows by that great businessman, who turns the country into a company. And in a dictatorship in which a resistance will appear.
“The businessman causes a new stage where democracy disappears and leads to terror, repression, murder. And modest characters, people from everyday life, gather to throw themselves into the mountains and try to denounce the lies of society,” he says, and says that “Whether or not the protagonism in the work finally triumphs, the will to resist takes it.” “There is no blind optimism, but there is the need to maintain convictions so as not to give up and believe that despite the problems there may be a better alternative. He was vital, he had confidence in his convictions,” he points out.
The editor, Juan Cerezo, points out that it is a fast-paced story with almost thriller moments, where “things get complicated in a way that the reader has not found in other Almudena stories. Doctors and journalists disappear, as in the Russia of Putin. And the novel stems from the desperation that the country could be fixed with a successful businessman, which leads to an unbearable dictatorship.” And, he summarizes, Everything is going to get better is going to become “a national episode of the future.”
