In this family there are no secrets! He is proclaimed by Father, the main character in the novel La familia (Anagrama), by Sara Mesa. And since there are no secrets, this man, who admires Ghandi above all things and practices humility in a perverse way, has decided that all the inhabitants of the house will spend the afternoon together in a room, every day from six to eight, under a brazier, saving energy. He works, the mother sews, the children are allowed to study, read manuals, draw or play chess. "Everyone was silent and seemed satisfied, and only Martina let out a sigh from time to time, as inappropriate as a fart."
Martina is the discordant element, the false daughter (niece, daughter of a stray relative) who has joined that so normal and at the same time so dark house, and is the tool that Mesa uses to expose the miseries of the nuclear family , or how violence is also exercised even though no one yells, even though no one hits.
The novel by the Sevillian, which links up with her previous titles, the highly awarded Un amor and Cara de pan, arrived in bookstores in September, with the start of the literary course, a few weeks apart from other books –La ciudad, by Lara Moreno (Lumen) and Las herederas, from Aixa de la Cruz (Alfaguara), which delved into that idea of emotional terrorism that is exercised even in the apparently most placid homes. The first, which interweaves three stories of women that take place in the same Lavapiés building, includes a story of violence in a gender family that escapes the stereotype and two other stories of women forced to create a new identity away from their children.
Construction Material (Random House/Periscopi), by Eider Rodríguez, has also just been published, an intimate exploration of what functional alcoholism does in a middle-class Basque family, and in March the book Los astronautas (Alfaguara) will land in the that Laura Ferrero novelizes the story of her parents, separated since she was a baby. It does not seem like a coincidence that so many narrators who move between 34 (De la Cruz is the youngest of the group) and 45 coincide in highlighting how dark normality can be.
"I don't think it's a coincidence," says Rodríguez, who was in Barcelona last week presenting his book. “Feminism has given us collective permission to talk about issues that were considered minor, residual, peripheral. Now we are sparking themes that were already in masculine literature but were not conceptualized that way, because they reflect power relations, class relations”. For the Basque author, every family "is a state", a tyrannical and undemocratic one, an idea that Mesa's book reflects with terrifying precision. “She has her customs, her dances and her own language, that familiar lexicon that Natalia Ginzburg spoke of. I am interested in seeing what flag each family goes out into the world with”, adds Rodríguez.
The family in your book, which is yours, does it with middle-class mannerisms—they have a building-supplies business and lots of opinions about the ways their Renteria clients paint, tile, and renovate their homes, the borders of his nation-state – and with an added shame to manage, that of the alcoholic father.
The heiresses of Aixa de la Cruz are four cousins, two pairs of sisters who have built their identities out of opposition, who have received not only a town house from their common grandmother, but also a load of mental disorders and psychiatric treatment. “The novel reflects my own ambivalent feelings towards the family”, explains the author from Bilbao. “On the one hand, it is the last refuge we have when social protections fail us, and I know this because I myself would have ended up on the street in difficult times if it had not been for the fact that my family has welcomed me or lent me a house or a car, but it is also the space in which we have emotionally configured ourselves and, barring bad luck, where we have learned to love and be loved”.
By becoming a mother, she adds, she understood the asymmetry that exists between father and children. The family, she says, "is a place that lends itself to abuse of power and we have all been victims of some, that is why returning to the family home is always returning to the place where we received the first wound."
She also has a theory regarding this accumulation of titles with a compatible focus on one of the most universal tropes in literature. “I have come to think that it is post-pandemic literature. For a while, we considered that the news tables would be filled with books about confinement, but they have been filled with reflections on the family, and I think it is related to the fact that we were locked up in our homes, with our nuclear family ”.
Laura Ferrero began writing Los astronautas, a novel that, she admits, she abandoned several times, shortly before the pandemic, in 2018. The trigger came when she found a photo that she did not know existed in which her two parents were together with her , a photo that recorded a family that existed but that she never lived in that way. “I felt the need to question the family story in which I had lived. A story stitched together with versions that contradicted each other. There was a personal need to step back and really see who those I called family were."
This is an exercise similar to the one that Rodríguez has done, who has turned her mother and father, and herself, into literary characters who have been made to behave as befitting characters in a novel. “This sanctification of happy families has always terrified me – adds Ferrero – Behind this sanctification there are many pressures on what a family should or should not be”. In her case, a break at a time, the eighties, with divorce barely legalized in Spain, in which couples barely learned to separate and basically learned it by doing it very badly. “I was interested in finding out what children who emerge from broken families are like, and how they survive the abandonment of functions by the parents. I was interested in elucidating what is the inheritance of families that were not happy”.
