A resistance fighter beheaded by the Nazis, a trans woman in the eighties, a cultural (and humorous) history of the human body and other books of the week

Mildred Harnack, an American from Milwaukee married to a German, moved in mid-1929 to her husband's country and became an English teacher. 14 years later, she died beheaded in Plötzensee, a prison on the outskirts of Berlin, on Hitler's orders on charges of helping to create a network of resistance and espionage against the Nazis. Her story was already known and she even has streets named after her in several German cities, but no one had reviewed in detail the life of this heroine. Until now. In The Frequent Darkness of Our Days, Rebecca Donner has managed to make the difficult leap from myth to historical story through a literary reconstruction for which she has helped with testimonies, letters and documents of all kinds that she has been weaving into a magnificent story. The book is an exemplary fiction, full of talent and emotion, as Jordi Amat argues in his review. A volume that also contributes to activating democratic memory.

Among this week's books, two learning novels set in the eighties and nineties also stand out. On the one hand, La mala costumbre, by Alana S. Portero, which tells the evolution of a trans woman in the San Blas neighborhood of Madrid, when it was very difficult to argue that she had been born in a body and with a name, Alejandro, with which she did not feel identified. The search for her identity leads her to set as references some women indicated by society, the "beautiful vanquished" who star in the plebeian and marginal life of Madrid in the eighties. On the other hand, in Sirimiri, Araceli Cobos narrates the life of Ana, a young woman in a convulsive Basque Country, with its problems of unemployment, industrial reconversion, drug dependence and, above all, terrorism.

Other titles reviewed by Babelia experts are the novel Una música, by Hernán Ronsino; and the essays La conversación infinita, which compiles the most outstanding interviews conducted by the journalist Borja Hermoso; The culture of narcissism, in which Christopher Lasch dissects that distorted and pathological perception of the self; and Illustrated Atlas of the Human Body, by the Argentine Pablo Maurette, a catalogue of organs, diseases and physiological phenomena analyzed with much humor.

You can follow BABELIA on Facebook and Twitter, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Read more

I'm already a subscriber