Tonina does not forgive Tuesday morning coffee on the terrace of the Ateneu Barcelonès. She takes it every week before her writing class and, while she does it, she takes the opportunity to write down in a notebook the new ideas that come to her mind and that could work in the novel she is writing. “My neighbor doesn't know it, but she is the protagonist. She is an older woman, like me, who loves to travel. People think that old people don't leave the house. This woman has seen almost more of the world than a president. And while I write, I discover new places with her,” he confesses.
It is possible that, when you finish your book, you will not have too much difficulty finding a publisher who is interested in a story of this nature. The editor Inés Planells recognizes that there are more and more elderly people starring in fiction and that the increase in 2023 is notable. Alba Colombo, sociologist and professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), is clear that this fact is due to “the aging of society, which is increasingly high, which is why an interest is generated that was not so present years ago. back. The cultural industry has detected this and is now striving to cover this need with novelties, in this case literary.”
Planells names Richard Osman (Billericay, 1970) and his series The Thursday Crime Club, with more than 10 million copies sold. At the end of summer, a new installment arrived, The Last One to Die (Espasa / Columna), in which his usual group of octogenarians continues solving crimes. “The idea arose during a visit to my mother at the retirement home. I thought that was the perfect place to set a crime that, of course, the residents would solve,” the author recalls to La Vanguardia.
The plots that arise around the elderly not only capture the interest of the public but also that of the great literary awards. One Hundred Cuyes (Alfaguara), by Gustavo Rodríguez (Lima, 1968), won the Alfaguara prize at the beginning of the year. This is the story of Frasia, a woman who must face a moral and legal dilemma, and the elderly she cares for. In its pages, Rodríguez reflects on how difficult it is to grow old and the importance of having dignity, both to live and to die. “This may come from the awareness of one's own aging, a perception that becomes more sensitive when one witnesses the collapse of one's parents and mentors and their death,” the author reflects.
The literary rentrée has also brought titles such as I won't see you die, by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Úbeda, 1956), which focuses on Gabriel Aristu and Adriana Zuber, lovers in Spain in the 60s who are separated by life. Their reunion fifty years later will awaken a whole series of feelings. “They are characters so real in their feelings, motivations and fractures, that putting them face to face, in their old age, in an open-hearted dialogue, is something dazzling for the reader. At that age the truth matters more because there is less time,” reflects Elena Ramírez, director of Seix Barral.
About love, and also sex, in old age Dolores Payás (Manresa, 1955) speaks in Ultimate Love). Her characters, a translator from Cádiz and an English lord, adapt to the new times and sign up for a dating website. “The most pleasant passions are had from the age of sixty onwards as ingenuity sharpens,” reflects the author, who was clear from the beginning that this was going to be the central axis of her book.
John Boyne (Dublin, 1971) is another of the novelists who ignored publishing trends and created his own by putting a child in front to tell his story. This is how The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was born. This year, the Irish author has published the sequel, All the Broken Pieces (Salamandra / Empúries), starring Gretel, the little boy's sister, who at 91 years old tells what happened to the family after the Second World War.
“I prefer to write about people much younger or much older than me. But it is true that, until now, this was not something very common. Literature for adults tends to ignore these voices,” she acknowledges, while celebrating that something is slowly beginning to change. The writer Irene Dische (New York, 1952) also applauds this breadth of vision. “I wrote about older people at the time because I knew and loved many of them when I was 20 years old. Now that I am also a grandmother, I can say that my perspective has not changed at all.”
In mid-May, Salamandra published The Empress of the New World, a story about the relationship between a grandmother, her daughter, and her granddaughter in postwar New York. The old woman is the torrential narrator. The same publisher has rescued The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood (Ottawa, 1939), winner of the Booker and Hammett prizes, and whose narrator, Iris, is an old woman who recounts the life of her sister.
The list also cannot miss Morning and Afternoon, by the recent Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Jon Fosse, which has just arrived in bookstores in Spanish from Nórdica Libros in co-edition with De Conatus. In this short novel, the Norwegian reflects on life and death at the hands of Johannes, a man whom the reader will follow from his birth to the grave.
There are some more titles that feature elderly heroes, such as The Air Raid Shelter Reading Club, by Annie Lyons, with the bookseller Gertie offering readings to her neighbors during the bombings in London during the Second World War; and other bestsellers from last year that are still very present in bookstores, such as Full Moon (Tusquets), by Aki Shimazaki (Gifu, 1954), about a couple who have lived in a nursing home since she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. An illness that Helena Guilera (Barcelona, 1993) also addresses in L'escuma, with Juli, a man who forgets musical notes.
Although in recent months there has been a notable increase in elderly protagonists, there is one name that resonates in the minds of the vast majority of authors consulted, and that is Jane Marple, the detective who stars in many Agatha Christie novels. Her creator noticed that women of a certain age who had never passed through the altar received condescending treatment. Therefore, she decided to give them a voice by making one of them the main character. Her influence endures today, to the point that twelve authors recreated her adventures in Miss Marple. Twelve new cases. She “She is independent and she does not present herself as a mother or grandmother. A reference for everyone,” concludes Dreda S. Mitchell (London, 1965), one of the authors on board the project.
