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Elvira Lindo, young people deserve a better future

2021-06-14T22:40:25.387Z


She dug into the intimate history of her parents who became the protagonists of a novel in which Elvira Lindo tells through her family life about post-war Spain, Franco's regime and democracy. (HANDLE)


 She dug into the intimate history of her parents who became the protagonists of a novel in which Elvira Lindo tells through her family life about post-war Spain, Franco's regime and democracy.

But today the Spanish journalist and writer, who in 'A heart open', published by Guanda in the translation by Roberta Bovaia, was able with great literary sensitivity and irony to give voice to the stories not on the thread of memory but immersing herself in the moment in which they happened, she is worried about the future of young people.


    "One thing that afflicts me a lot is the future of young people. I see that they have fewer expectations and dreams than we do. When I was young I had financial problems like many boys but I had faith, I knew that many good things could happen, instead today the boys are in prey to uncertainty. It is as if they know that the future cannot be better anyway and that their life will be worse than the one we had. I am very sorry. My generation has a moral obligation to work and commit, too. politically, so that the future of these young people may be better ", Lindo, 59, recently arrived in Rome, told ANSA to present 'A heart open', with which she makes herself known in our country, in an eagerly awaited meeting at ' Libri Come ', the book and reading festival atAuditorium Parco della Musica in Rome back in attendance and with some streaming events until June 13th.


    "We must commit ourselves from an environmental point of view and maintain the civil rights that we have won in Europe, not lose them" underlines the writer who has four children, one biological and three of her husband, the Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina who thanks in the closing note of the novel for "his literary advice".


    Opinionist for El Pais, Lindo, who was born in Cadiz in 1962 and is the author of the successful children's series Manolito Quattrocchi, published in Italy by Lapis, argues "that it is sometimes very difficult to write about current affairs. Today's world seems to me sometimes truly incomprehensible to all. The pandemic has placed us in a moment of great dystopia. It is as if we had anticipated the future, it is already happening.


    Not to mention the truly complex and sad economic situation "he stresses.


    In the first pages of 'Open heart' we find ourselves instead in 1939, in a war-torn Madrid where his father Manuel struggles against poverty and manages to make it through his Shrewdness and strength. He becomes a strong-willed and extravagant man, the opposite of the reserved, silent wife, a lover of books and reading who dies soon, when the youngest daughter, Elvira, is a teenager. Theirs is an imperfect love story but where love exists as Lindo tells us that she investigates her parents and her country.


    "For each chapter of this book I decided to be in that moment, in that present, not to remember what had happened. If I had decided to write a memoir, memories would have been different. One of the first discoveries I made he was the child my father was at age 9. I knew what had happened to him because he had told me about it many times, but I put myself in his shoes and wanted to be true to his personality. I did a lot of research to understand what he was like. Madrid of that moment, a completely destroyed city. I did a bit like Roberto Rossellini when he told the child of 'Germany year zero'. I did not just fathom my parents' personalities, it was a search for landscapes, for the geography of Spain because I wanted to understand how it was in those years "Lindo tells.


    With her mother who "was a person and a much more mysterious character than her father" she maintained "a kind of red thread, a mental conversation carried on all the time. I often asked her if she agreed with my behavior at the time. It was more vulnerable, she had an overflowing inner world. If she had lived in a different context, surely she would have done an intellectual job. I did not know that when the war ended she went to finish her studies in a boarding school in Valencia, many children never started studying again . My parents had all the ingredients to build a story, "says the writer.


    Travel is a fundamental element in the novel, accompanied by some drawings: "My parents have moved a lot and this is interesting. The births of us children have always had to do with a large public infrastructural work in Spain. I was born in Cadiz because at that time there was a big building project in the port of the city. Spain is a background canvas that runs through the life of my parents but in filigree, I didn't want to write a historical novel. And theirs was a generation that changed its mentality a lot, was born under a dictatorship and then at a certain point the democracy arrived that transformed everything. Words like divorce, abortion, sexual freedom and political commitment, above all, began to be heard. the Lindo.And he hopes that Italian readers will love this book, which I believe they can identify with. Between my country and Italy there are many things in common "he says with a nice smile. (ANSA).


Source: ansa

All life articles on 2021-06-14

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