He believed it, he said it and tasted it: "Literature is more life". Almudena Grandes opted to understand life writing it, looking at the sides and backward, living, as it happens in her novels, from reality and imagination to recognize emotions that she would not otherwise reach. The Madrid writer has died in the house of Ella de Madrid at 61 years after two resisting the attacks of a cancer.
He was born in Madrid on May 7, 1960, in the Chamartín neighborhood. He studied geography and history. He graduated from the same thing. The first steps at the office of him writing texts for encyclopedias, at the same time armed short stories. Since adolescence he showed an extreme appetite for literature. He kept it for 40 years of novels, stories, articles in the country, political and civic engagement in favor of those who have no room in history. Or in memory.
He lived with intensity the 1980s, that festive bench of hispanic underground that is called Movie Madrid. Malasaña was the barge of a time in which Almudena Grandes set his first literary astronomy, full of impetus and new stimuli. From the enjoyable and learned in those days she extracted the first novel from him, the ages of Lulu. It was 1989. A story with which she won the XI award the vertical smile and that since then linked all the work of her to the Tusquets publisher, driving the award. A strong writing, loaded with eroticism, of debauchery, of characters shaped by desire. It was her first success. The novel resulted in 20 languages. And, from there, she began her expedition. Bigas Luna adapted the story to the cinema. "Ages ... He gave me the possibility of living the life I wanted, I can never settle that debt," he said years later.
In his second novel, I'll call you Friday (1991), he traced the itinerary (still to be done) of what his narrative work would be. Gerardo Herrero adapted it to the cinema in 1996. It is a love story in a delanged Madrid. It is a story of two beings baffled. It is a drive and disconsory story. But it is with the third of her novels, Malena is not a name of Tango (1994) when she already sends the territory of her in writing. Her life deployed it in a book of stories, woman models (1991). The Madrid of the last compass of the twentieth century is, again, the space in which everything happens. He will be in other novels again. They came later atlas of human geography (1998) -transformed in film this time by Azucena Rodríguez-, the difficult airs (2002) and cardboard castles (2004). The Spain of the twentieth and twentieth century is the place where it is here and onwards the volume of the literary work of it, of an own realism where psychological introspection encourages the characters and their frames.
In this follows the path of some writers with whom he always maintained the link: Galdós and Brown Bazán, among others. And also with a desire to reconstruct the reality of women after centuries of oppression. In the Prologue of Models of Women wrote this: "As in the literary world, a principle of sexual discrimination prevails that forces writers to rule at every step of the gender of the characters of their books, while the writers are privileged and Envitably free to do it, I would like to clarify, once and for all, that ... I think there is no kind of feminine literature at all ... ". But yes a battle consciousness in writing.
Almudena Grandes developed a critical look and attentive to convulsions of this time. Many times it was from her own biography. From very soon she develops and waves a political commitment by the margin on the left. The extinct left united was her shelter against the storm. And from there she also leaves the construction of her intellectual ideology. From this she also did a trade through her articles in her press of her, which are the extension and, sometimes, the laboratory of her literary side. Memory also belongs to anonymous people and it is to them who in some way it is added and provides voice in newspapers. Those and those who have no room in the great epic of the twentieth century are those who interest you. Citizens issues that matter to him are projected towards the others. The message of it involves the 'slopes', to the siteless, to the guests of the periphery of power.
Another part of the germ of what is going to be its last narrative stage is in an extensive and complex story of 919 pages, the difficult air, where it exposes the history of two Spanish families across the wide part of the 20th century. One of Falangist affiliation and the other declaring republican. The two linked by a marriage between their children. Somehow, this novel is the beginning of the last of its literary projects, the series of novels entitled Episodes of an endless war: six independent novels that narrate significant moments of anti-life resistance in a period between 1939 and 1964. So far it has Published five: Inés and La Joy (2010), the reader of Julio Verne (2012), the three weddings of Manolita (2014), the patients of Dr. García (2017) and the mother of Frankenstein (2020) - this year was named Doctor Honoris causes by the UNED-. Postuma will leave the last of the saga, Mariano at the Bidasoa, which has been completed and fixed the argument in 1964, when the 25 years of peace are met. This set is the great legacy of it, the one that crosses part of our recent history and its damage.
With the disease at full capacity, he did not stop writing either. On October 21 he let know about his illness in his article from the weekly country. He titled him throw a fence: "I will continue to be here, writing an article on this same page every two weeks, and on the back newspaper every Monday, that space, sacred for me, because it allows me to maintain contact with my readers in any circumstance, will allow us to find us, to know about us, stay together. "
From everything he had around he also did Scripture: from his neighborhood, Malasaña; From his devotion to Atlético de Madrid - he trained at the Peña de los 50-, of the summers in Rota (next to her husband, the poet and director of the Cervantes Instituto, Luis García Montero, and the friends of always: Joaquín Sabina, Felipe Benítez Reyes, Benjamín Prado, Juan José Téllez, the editor Chus Visor, Miguel Ríos, Javier Ruibal, the Editora Ángeles Aguilera ...).
The houses of Almudena and Luis have been a meeting place for years, something like an open square of people of culture, politics, street. She presumed to make the best baked in this city (Madrid). Maybe it may be. Around a table with diners the afternoons passed between verses, and laughter, and anecdotes, as a platform of happiness. A few months ago she premiered as a grandmother.
Date Of Update: 27 November 2021, 13:37
