SortPagna, 1950s, under the regime of Francisco Franco. SortEverina is a particular girl, perhaps a little autistic. Compulsive reader with a prodigious memory, Since the age of seven he senses that the world that surrounds it is destined to disappear. And this pushes her to practice preventive mourning, because sooner or later it will lose everything and everyone. Her love for solitude and her relational difficulties do not improve with school education that her mother gives her, as a privateist.
Why Severina’s microcosm revolves around the parents and the neighbor López, And to the code speeches that he feels pronounced by adults, eager to keep it away from the ideology of the Franco regime. Who is the “Bambin Jesus”? What does it mean to be “decorated”? The little girl does not dare to ask, so, too protected, it will grow without knowing how to decipher reality and people. At 19 he obtained the assignment of Maestra in Dusa, a village of the Pyrenees where she dreams of having a house of her own, becoming more sociable and seeing the snow.
An intriguing man, he said the beast, will become his secret erotic dream And it will be the adult who will help him to recompose the plot that binds his life to the collective past, in a novel that is a metaphor that traces the history of Spain from the darkest years of the franchism to the democratic transition.
Author of numerous novels, Imma Monsó is originally from Lleida, in Catalonia. With “The teacher and the beast” he won the òmniium prize and the one for the best Catalan novel in 2024. Photo: Jordi Play
Who is Severina?
She is a young woman who spent her childhood in an isolated house in the eastern part of Catalonia, immersed in books. His parents, despite being humble people, give great value to reading. It reminds me of those young lonely young people who spend the days in front of the screen. However, the girl’s inner experience is very different: the reading before the digital era was, and is still a privileged experience that makes us more attentive, more human, more critical and more aware than superficial and fragmented navigation than that The chaos of the web offers us. In Severina, despite her insecurities, reading allows you to face adult life with an unusual mood and maturity in our young generations.
“The teacher and the beast” by Imma Monsó, Feltrinelli350 pages, 20 €
How was this figure born?
The women of my mother’s family told very funny stories about their experience as rural teachers in Catalan Pyrenees. They were amazed by the contrast between those remote mountain villages and their place of origin, the eastern Catalonia. There are very evident differences between the different areas of the region: in a fairly reduced space you can cross landscapes of all kinds, and this is also expressed in subtle differences in the character and speech of the inhabitants.
Román and Simona, Severina’s parents, are political opponents and speak in code. Was it a frequent situation at the time?
At the time there was no mention of the political situation in families or on the street, nor in the media. The won were silent for fear of reprisals and not to remember the suffering suffered. There was a silent majority that preferred to forget. In the late post -war period, only a politically aware minority remained informed through foreign printing or radio stations in exile. For this reason, Severina’s parents use conventional and strange terms in front of her daughter, giving rise to rather comic misunderstandings.
Severina is intelligent, but naive. It seems to embody the conspiracy of the silence that the regime had imposed on an entire people: is it so?
Absolutely yes. Severina works almost like a metaphor for ignorance and disinformation of a people under a dictatorship. His unaware of the political and social situation under the Franco regime is similar to that of private citizens of information on the reality of the country.
As a teacher, Severina is assigned to a village on the Pyrenees, Dusa: is it a real place?
Dusa is a fictitious construction inspired by Vilaller, my father’s village. The Alta Ribagorza region is far from the tourist stereotypes of Barcelona or the Catalan coast. It is a little -known and very wild high mountain area. This story has a lot to do with the discoveries I made about my father, including the file opened by the martial court on him: my mother had never talked to me.
Who is Simeó and what does it represent for Severina?
It is his first erotic passion and it is that type of person to whom the defects forgive because it compensates them with a grace difficult to describe. Today it would be a politically incorrect character, but in the sixties it was the erotic myth of the country, indulge in alcohol but is full of wisdom and reveals some puzzles of his childhood to Severina.
For many years, in Spain there has been no talk of the past and the crimes of the dictatorship. What is the situation today?
We live in dangerous times of oblivion: there are almost no more survivors that can tell us firsthand what fascisms have been in Europe. But there are still novels: there is no better transmission belt to understand the real life of human beings at every stage of history.
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