Everyone has a Civil War story." It can be what parents or grandparents told, and for new generations, great-grandparents. But the dispute continues in the memory of all families almost 90 years later.
A friend told Pilar Eyre the story of her grandfather, a man who went into exile when the conflict ended and was never heard from again. 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 1939 and never showed signs of life, without knowing why.
The author was very clear that there was a novel in this story and she started writing. Two years later, he published De amor y de guerra (Planeta), which is also built from scraps of other anecdotes related by friends and relatives and from the documentation and testimonies that Eyre collected when he was 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 conflict, despite the fact that 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 grief after the death of his parents in the bombing of 1937 and who marries Beatriz and then leaves - her, being pregnant, heading for French exile.
"My characters are ordinary people, not heroes, because the way to really know history is through ordinary people", explained Eyre on Wednesday at the Casa del Llibre on the Rambla de Catalunya, where he presented De amor y of war And perhaps the ordinary characters are also the ones who add salt to literature, because Eyre's new novel is entertaining, exciting and also a good window into what the post-war period was like. Those who left and those who stayed.
The war and the post-war period caused suffering that new generations have not known. Since then it has been lived in peace and technological improvements have only made progress. The latest invention is artificial intelligence, which can be very useful, but which also arouses great fears and suspicions. There are even those who think that its development may be the beginning of the end. From the end of the world
The neuroscientist Mariano Sigman has studied the subject in depth and, 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 put an end to orality, but writing has been central to human development and has not supplanted oral communication. When they invented the train, people used it, but we never stopped walking...". Sigman gave several examples to dissuade technophobes from their fears and clarify that the two intelligences, human and artificial, can "co-exist". "It's just a matter of being sensible with the use of the new".
Sigman's reassuring message comes after Luis López Carrasco wrote, published and won the Herralde de Novela prize with El desierto blanco (Anagrama), in which 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 mason have been selected to board a balloon and reach a deserted island after a nuclear attack. They will save the human species, but not one towards the balloon and must be thrown into the sea. Who would you shoot?
López Carrasco, who is also a filmmaker, presented El desierto blanco on Thursday at La Central on Carrer Mallorca. "I have set the novel in a future time, which looks towards the past, towards 2012, when according to the prophecy of the Mayan calendar the world was supposed to end", explained the author, who has not resorted to alarmism: "I didn't want to get carried away by catastrophism and I 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, even though I invent a lot".
And it's that ordinary people are the ones who tell the good stories. At least until AI starts publishing novels.
