The world of letters was moved a year ago when the news of the death of Almudena Grandes. In the midst of the general mourning caused by the pandemic, missing, at 61 years old, from an author so loved by colleagues and readers, caused a very special sadness. Just some time before, the writer had told in a column of the newspaper El País, that he had cancer. The outcome was quick, but it gave him time to write one last novel.
That text has just been published in Spain and next month it will hit Argentine bookstores, edited by the Tusquets label. The title of the book is “Everything is going to get better”. It is a dystopia that imagines Spain in the near future, governed by the “Movimiento Ciudadano ¡Soluciones Ya!” party, a political experiment commanded by a businessman that is going to end very badly.
“On the one hand, the book includes a populist temptation to destroy institutions and politicians. On the other hand, it also serves as a wake-up call for these institutions to remember that, if they distance themselves from the people, they can be demolished at any moment,” said the writer at the presentation of the book a few days ago. Luis García Montero, husband of the writer and current director of the Cervantes Institute.
He had a special role in the final writing of the work, whose last chapter remained unfinished. “Almudena began taking notes on April 1, 2020 and on September 20 she received the bad news of cancer during a medical examination. What was going to be a period of preparation for the novel became a kind of table with which to cling to life in the face of illness -Garcia Montero said during the launch of the novel-. He was writing until a few weeks before his death, when we began to understand that there was no way out and every day he was a little worse. He stayed in the last chapter and already in a conversation he told me that he had no strength and he saw the end: he made me some suggestions on how to finish and I did not want to write literature or imagine, but to follow his instructions “.
In December, “One year and three months” will also be published in Argentina, the book of poems that García Montero wrote while accompanying the last moments of his wife’s life.
Almudena’s books
Among us, “The Frozen Heart” (2007) is her most widely read novel and the one that inaugurated a new stage in the writer’s narrative, where she delves into the civil war and the Franco regime. With this theme she wrote 5 books together under the name “Episodes of an endless war”. But the success that made her famous overnight was “The Ages of Lulu” from 1989, which like many of her other novels, was made into a movie.
According to her husband, after “Everything is going to get better” there will be “nothing more to read” by Almudena. Another bad news for the readers who admire and follow her for more than 30 years.
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