Las tres bodas de Manolita - Almudena Grandes

The start of this decade has been tough on Spanish literature with the premature deaths of at least two notable writers. The death of Javier Marías in 2022 was certainly noted in the UK, but not so much Almudena Grandes who died less than a year earlier of cancer at the age of 61. That's perhaps understandable as few of her works have been translated into English, but she was a major figure in Spain and particularly associated with her home city of Madrid. As writers, the two were very different in style and content, Marías certainly the more literary of the two, but Grandes had her own important part to play in the chronicling of lives in her works. No more so than in her final series of novels, Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes from an interminable war), works all centred on a painful subject kept under a veil of silence that few had tackled directly; the horrors of the Civil War and the lasting impact of the Franco years. 

My experience of reading Almudena Grandes to date has been restricted to her earliest works, Las edades de Lulú (1989), Malena es un nombre de tango (1994) and Atlas de geografía humana (1998). Lulú aside, the nature of her writing in the other two works (from memory) is that they are epic and generational in scope, involving personal hardships endured in the complexity of family histories and relationships. They struck me as more novelistic personal drama and relationship tales than anything of literary merit, but her characters felt like real, living people - sometimes a little too real. One thing for sure is that she can spin a tale. That seems to me to still be very much her style in her later works, and it seems to have mixed results however when applied to the Episodios de una guerra interminable series, at least as far as the third book in the series goes, Les tres bodas de Manolita (The Three Weddings of Manolita).

Las tres bodas de Manolita is set principally in Madrid, initially covering the years from May 1937 to 1940 as Madrid falls into the hands of the fascists. The family histories are numerous, the miseries endured by ordinary people in the post-Civil War Franco period as described here are horrendous. Using Manolita as the central figure but extending out to family, relatives and friends who each experience their own problems, the author tries to incorporate the scale of the horror of those years. No-one seems to remain untouched by its terrors and deprivations. 

In 1937 Manolita is fourteen and a half - not quite ready for three weddings. Her father owns a seed store, her brother Antonio Perales García, known as Toñito, holds clandestine meetings for the JSU (Juventud Socialista Unificada) at their home whenever their stepmother Marīa Pilar is out at work. Their stepmother has airs as she worked for a family of nobles and has her own soirees with other former servants. We are also introduced to Antonio de Hoyos y Vincent. Born to a wealthy family, his father a marquis, Hoyos is now a writer and an anarchist, the luxury family home given over to a commune of refugees of families of people from towns in north on run from fascists. When the falangists take Madrid in 1939 however, Manolita's father, a socialist, is arrested without charge and shot and her brother is forced into hiding, María Pilar, who has been buying and selling stolen goods that Hoyos' friends have liberated from rich owners, is also eventually arrested and sent to Ventas prison, leaving 17 year old Manolita to look after family and having to look for work.

There is no let up in the troubles to come. Toñito has a plan to look after Manolita and help a friend la Palmera (Paco Román), a much older, openly gay flamenco dancer by arranging a marriage. Found starving on streets by Hoyos, La Palmera discovers the raw talent of Eladia Torres, saves her from being exploited and achieve fame under the name of Carmelilla de Jerez. A raging fire burns within her, but nothing can save them from the reach of the fascist powers. Hoyos is imprisoned and Eladia too, the state appropriating the property of those arrested. They are charged, shot and end up in a common grave. Manolita, having lost the shop and her home, travels to Villaverde with her younger siblings, leaving them with friend of her father's brother, while others are sent to the State school in Bilbao. Visiting Porlier prison, she learns of the fate of Hoyos, but everyone she encounters has a terrible tale of woe to tell or live through. 

Las tres bodas of Manolita is indeed a catalogue of woe - what is related above is just the opening sequence of events. There are few if any uplifting moments, and happiness when it appears is brief and quickly extinguished. It doesn't prevent everyone from continuing to struggle and resist. Manolita's brother arranges marriage for her to Silverio Aguado Guzmán, el Manitas. An engineer, he is the only person who could help his JSU colleagues work a copying machine sent to them to produce resistance pamphlets. As his fiancée Manolita can smuggle plans into Porlier prison and get his advice. Plans for their marriage however are dashed when a raid uncovers the photocopiers, the JSU are disbanded in disarray and Silverio, sentenced to 20 years is moved to another prison. Toñito goes into hiding.

Thereafter the novel heads off in a number of different directions, extending its reach to a wide range of characters. Most notable - but no less misery leaden - is the story of Manolita's 14 year old sister Isabel and the other younger sisters who have been sent to a convent in Bilbao. It's an impoverished existence (obviously), washing linen for hotels and cafés, half starved and treated as slaves, Isa's hands react badly to the caustic soda used and she falls seriously ill. There is also the story of El Orejas, who has had suspicions laid against him, but manages to avoid the same fate of detainment and executions that others have suffered by cooperating with the authorities and befriending Manolita until he can find out where Antonio is, but he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.

If I've spent a lot of time in this review relating the plot, well, it's because Las tres bodas de Manolita is a very plot heavy book, and I've barely scratched the surface. It's a book of people's stories, and all of them have different levels of struggle betrayal, dashed hopes and fear of the future. With extensive appendices in the Kindle eBook edition, it's a lot to take in. Despite the underlying theme of the horrors of the post Civil War Franco years, it feels fractured and difficult to keep up with the vast range of characters, or indeed to retain interest into them, although this is perhaps more of a consequence of the author's writing style than the subject. Almudena writes in the voice of ordinary people, often in colourful exchanges of conversational gossip. You could imagine these being rapid fire exchanges filled with gestures and inflections, but reading them takes a lot longer and is less interesting. As is often the case with Almudena Grandes, you feel like you have literally lost the plot as it spins off into generational and familial connections. 

Its all a bit much to take in and I have to say I struggled to retain interest in the endless procession of characters and their troubled lives. Despite my reservations and personal difficulties with reading Almudena Grandes, the structure and epic scope of her plotting and the novelistic devices that make it feel like fictional storytelling, there is no question that she understands people, that she is recounting their real horrors and deprivations, putting their lives and their problems across authentically and with genuine love for them. For all the difficulty of reading them, her accounts of lives struggling and destroyed by the Franco regime is nonetheless an important testimony and I'll definitely explore more (hopefully more focussed) parts of this final series of works.

Reading notes: Las tres bodas de Manolita, Book 3 of Episodios de una guerra interminable by Almudena Grandes was first published in 2014 by Tusquets in Spain. I don't believe there is an English translation of any of the five novels in this series. I read a Kindle edition of Manolita, which has an afterword by the author and numerous appendicies, the book running to around 750 pages. I started the novel quite a while ago and didn't get it finished much beyond the point I reached in the plot description (about three-quarters of the way through the book?). I tried to pick it up again recently, but despite extensive notes I found I had lost the thread of the narrative. This review is mainly constructed from notes I made at the time, so there could be minor details lacking. As noted above, it will not deter me from reading other books in the series when I have the opportunity.