The life of books is unpredictable for the author. He invents them, works on them, publishes them, lets them go and they go, like children, wherever they want. In the same way that the offspring of Luis García Montero and Almudena Grandes has enlisted in the Falange in what Juan Manuel de Prada has called a true case of juvenile rebellion, to Ana Iris Simón a book redder than incandescent iron has come out that, however, makes the Spanish half right blink with beatitude and drool with tenderness. What’s happening here?
Is named ‘Fair’, edited by Círculo de Tiza and has broken the genre, so to speak. The ton of self-referential garbage full of imperious glorifications of the small-town and the “authentic” (ironic quotes), with praise to the agricultural women of the own family, stinking of boasting and repentant hipster morality, ends with ‘Feria’. In the simple truth that this book reveals, the pose of all navel pamphlets dies. The author does not use the countryside or the town as a pretext to talk about herself, but on the contrary.
The bizarre characters of her family, the living and the dead, speak through Ana Iris Simón, some turned into ghosts and even an uncle of hers who died a fool. She uses the wickers of what they have told her and her own memories of a girl from the nineties to glimpse the reflections of what is today an adult woman, on the left, and absolutely unprejudiced. Something unusual, by the way, in these times so prone to the banner, heresy and militancy.
I suppose this is what has fascinated so many people on the right while keeping the left, with the exception of Ramon Espinar, Daniel Barnabas and some others, indolent and mute. The author is not afraid of sanbenitos nor does she consider them. She tells us with grace and without complexes, for example, that it seems like a scam that the liberation of women happens by not having children; or that she fell in love with the Catholic Church and secretly received communion from her father; or that the slogans of what a left-wing woman should think according to the dogmas of the present slip olympically.
She fell in love with the Catholic Church and secretly received communion from her father
The book is written with plain sincerity and direct language. His political reflections and depth charges do not ask to be underlined, but appear, among the anecdotes and the abundant poetry of the pages, with the calm tone that an illiterate old woman would use to tell you what life is around her stretcher table. However, Simon is neither old nor illiterate. He was born in Campo de Criptana, where they are from Sara Montiel, the writer Maria Zaragoza and the paralympic athlete Ortiz purification, in 1991. A town without relief where the shadow is cast, apparently, by the windmills and the huge women.
Song to an extinct Spain
The highest virtue of ‘Feria’ (and the strangest) is that you will place it, on the shelf, next to the books Luis Carandell. Like those, it contains the portrait of an extinct Spain but avoids any nationalist smell. He speaks fondly of the country of pesetas, of the grocery stores that smelled of bacon, of the Firefighter Torero, the stuffed animals of the tombolas, improvisation and frankness, but he does not ask for a return to any Arcadia, nor does he paint it where it does not exist. The author, daughter and granddaughter of showmen and communists, is simply known “Witness to the end of Spain, the end of exceptionality”, and is limited to the transformation of the country into something more like an airport terminal.
An example: “I remembered hearing my grandmother Maria Solo complaining about the Chinese before dying. Not from them, but from their establishments, which were beginning to grow like mushrooms, but also I remembered her complaining about the malls and the India Bill, which was a ball pool in Aranjuez, and the Pizza Hutts, “because before the only place where you could buy toys or ride the horses or eat a hamburger was the fair, and now look.” “Now look” meant that the fairs had ceased to have meaning because life, the world, our own existence had become one “.
The fairs had ceased to have meaning because life had become a
That is, in my opinion, the heart of the book: the malaise in the face of the capitalist standardization process that, in the hysterical exaltation of the limitless fair, makes all peoples, speeches and behaviors the same. However, I already said, Simon does not glorify the people more than they deserve, nor does he hide their defects, nor does it take away the responsibility that the Spanish has in its own decadence. He does not propose closing the borders to changes, nor does he insult those adapted to crown himself as a special girl. He simply describes with smiling melancholy that world that we abandon and that abandons us.
“Progress brought with it, in addition to roundabouts and terraced chalets with clear wooden doors and supermarkets that no longer smelled like dead animals, a wave of cruelty, and it brought it not to the world, but to our eyes, which suddenly began to see victims that they did not see before and happy those who suffer and Matthew 5, 4 “. Amen.
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