The predictions about post-pandemic literature are fulfilled

During the confinement, we were asked a question insistently: “How will the pandemic affect writing?”.

Without hands or crystal ball, we answered by developing fantastic hypotheses Rodari.

We gave free rein to an imagination born from observing reality.

We predict dystopias and books exalting the reunion, the embrace and the joy of love.

The latter were emerging as the great commercial possibility and the least pejiguera bet.

Books fancy and refreshing like

, with an imaginative bubble, who pose to look splendid next to the Instagram cups.

Books that often practice the demagogy of excluding the difficulty of the languages ​​of art, using the argument of classism when the difficulty is inherent to art -also to education- and only becomes a classist attitude when it is used to expel or treating readers like amoebas who, on the other hand, are losing the ability to stretch to see what lies beyond the fence: a dangerous garden or forest.

The difficulty sometimes does not insult: start conversations in another key, beyond the background noise, breaking the ice sheet of the frozen lake.

The pandemic was difficult and requires a complex look.

Certain difficulties link the literary with a different way of approaching reality and the human condition.

Outside of the predictable, cheesy, comforting, affordable, which are not adjectives that should be completely exiled from the concept of literature, but which today are annoying because, from the logic of the market, they colonize everything, because they steal the word, because they saturate it. of meanings that are only linked to comfort or the need to pass the time.

I have nothing against consolation or hanging out, but our job sometimes has other aspirations.

I don't want Banville to leave.

I have nothing against consolation or hanging out, but our job sometimes has other aspirations.

I don't want Banville to leave.

I have nothing against consolation or hanging out, but our job sometimes has other aspirations.

I don't want Banville to leave.

After the pandemic, I am ashamed to witness an outbreak of joy that has that point of cynicism consisting of wanting to empathize at all costs.

When literature, in dark times, is reduced to self-help, it scares me.

This prediction of confinement has been fulfilled;

another has also been fulfilled that perhaps we did not dare to pronounce aloud: the presence of death.

Reality becomes stubborn when the ice rinks are converted into morgues and primary care centers are closed.

Death today is not approached from its religious transcendence or from the tantrum of "I can't disappear", but rather as fear regarding recent years, precariousness of nursing homes, desperately clinging to love, fear of contagion, vibration of the cell , ways of being a walking dead or a living dead,

the funereal character of screened-out images and anatomies, photos, empty cities or the murderous mud of lagoons in which fish gasp.

Death is not metaphysics or individualism, but a social issue.

From different tones —comedy, dystopia, documentary realism, polyphonic novel, political science fiction, ghost stories— wonderful books are written by Rafael Reig, Ray Loriga, Elvira Navarro, Miguel Ángel Hernández, Andrés Barba, Begoña Méndez… Death, immortal presence of Literature, is resignified in the post-pandemic from very varied literary modulations to tell the precariousness of old age and the end of dreams confused with the end of youth.

In the background, the image of a deadly residence where we will eat badly and sleep, with drugs, in a little plastic chair.

To wake up from the nightmare,

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