"Everyone has a story about the Civil War." It may be what parents or grandparents told and, for new generations, great-grandparents. But the conflict is still there, in the memory of all Spanish families, almost 90 years later.
A friend explained to Pilar Eyre the story of her grandfather, a man who went into exile at the end of the conflict and about whom nothing more was ever heard. Until 50 years later, they found it by chance. He lived in France just a few kilometers from the Spanish border. He had stayed there in '39 and never showed any signs of life, he didn't really know why.
The author was very clear that there was a novel in that story and she began to write. Two years later, he published De amor y de guerra (Planeta), which is also built from scraps of other anecdotes told by friends and family and from the documentation and testimonies that Eyre collected when working on The Last Guerrilla (2001), the biography of the anarchist Quico Sabaté.
With this material, Eyre has articulated the story of Beatriz, a girl from a good family who decides to stay in Barcelona during the war, even though her family has moved to France. Of love and war is also the story of Román, a middle-class boy who wants to study engineering, who is overcome by pain after the death of his parents in the bombing of '37 and who marries Beatriz and then abandons her, being she pregnant, heading to French exile.
“My characters are ordinary people, not heroes, because the way to truly know history is through normal people,” Eyre explained on Wednesday at the Casa del Libro on Rambla de Catalunya where he presented Of Love and War. And perhaps ordinary characters are also those who add salt to literature, because Eyre's new novel is entertaining, exciting and also a good window to know what the post-war period was like. That of those who left and that of those who stayed.
The war and the post-war period caused suffering that new generations have not known. Since then we have lived in peace and technological improvements have only advanced. The latest invention is artificial intelligence, which can be very useful, but also arouses great fears and misgivings. There are even those who think that its development could be the beginning of the end. From the end of the world.
The neuroscientist Mariano Sigman has studied the matter in depth and, together with the technologist Santiago Bilinkis, has written Artificial (Debate). Sigman stopped by the Finestres bookstore on Monday to present the book and also to reassure the audience about the alleged dangers of this new non-human intelligence.
“Socrates hated writing because he thought it would end orality, but writing has been fundamental in human development and has not supplanted oral communication. When they invented the train, people used it but we have never stopped walking…” Sigman gave several examples to dissuade technophobes from their fears and clarify that the two intelligences, human and artificial, can “coexist.” “It's just a matter of being sensible with the use of the new.”
Sigman's reassuring message comes after Luis López Carrasco has written, published and won the Herralde Novel Prize with The White Desert (Anagrama) where the end of the world seems possible and imminent. A doctor, a botanist, a hunter, a fisherwoman, a carpenter, an engineer, a veterinarian, a judge and a bricklayer have been selected to board a balloon and reach a desert island after a nuclear attack. They will save the human species, but one does not fit in the balloon and must be thrown into the sea. Who would I shoot?
López Carrasco, who is also a filmmaker, presented The White Desert on Thursday at La Central on Mallorca Street. “I have set the novel in a future time, which looks towards the past, around 2012, when according to the prophecy of the Mayan calendar, the world was going to end,” explained the author who has not resorted to tremendism: “I did not want to take "because of catastrophism and I have looked for small and simple things." Characters like Carlos and Aitana, “with whom I feel comfortable because they have to do with what I know, although I invent a lot.”
And ordinary people are the ones who tell good stories. At least until artificial intelligence starts publishing novels.
