Santander (EFE) I believed that we had to face it with joy and hope.
“She wanted to return to the mandate that joy was a form of resistance to say that we must not fall into cynicism or indifference, but rather continue betting on hope,” she said in a meeting with journalists in Santander, in the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP).
Almudena Grandes, habitual presence in the Menéndez Pelayo
Almudena Grandes was, since the 1990s, a regular presence at the UIMP summer courses, which in its first week of academic activity is dedicating a course to her and also pays tribute to her this afternoon at the opening of its Tuesdays Literary, in a one-on-one meeting between Luis García Montero and Juan Cerezo, from Tusquets, editor of Grandes.
García Montero had to finish his wife’s last book, “Everything is going to improve” with the indications that she left him for the last chapter, which he did not have time to write before he died, in November 2021.
As the poet and director of the Cervantes Institute has pointed out, he only needed one novel to complete his “Episodes of an interminable war”, the literary adventure in which he embarked following the path of Benito Pérez Galdós or Max Aub, when the coronavirus.
She felt so affected that she decided to write a book to “respond from literature to everything that the pandemic had put on the table”, as she already did in the 2008 crisis, which led her to interrupt her episodes to publish “Los besos en bread”.
The dangers that degrade democracy
According to García Montero, if he had previously used fiction to learn about the legacy of the past from the present, in his last book he used the present to try to understand the dangers that were degrading democracy and that “the pandemic illuminated” at a time of resurgence of democracy. the totalitarianisms.
For the writer, one of those dangers is the “conscious” deterioration of politics to bring about its discredit, to the point that “if there are moments of possible joy such as the economy doing well,” people prefer to stop talking about the economy and spread hoaxes and lies to spread discouragement.
“We have seen many of the things that she announced, not reproduced in Spain but lived in China or Iran. Or in the way in which social networks can manage to control consciences or replace critical thinking with organized lies”, she stated.