AUTHOR: Almudena Grandes
PUBLISHER: Tusquets Editores
GENRE: Realistic Fiction
READER’S NAME: Eduardo de Lamadrid
DATE: April 27, 2015
Las tres bodas de Manolita, the third entry in the series Episodios de una Guerra Interminable (Episodes from an Interminable War), attempts, like Galdos’ Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes), to recover the historical memory of Spain and novelize diverse episodes of the anti-Francoist struggle during the post-Spanish Civil War period. The cycle was initiated in 2010 with Inés y la alegría (Inés and Mirth) and continued in 2012 with El lector de Julio Verne (The Reader of Jules Verne). Like those previous entries, even though its narrative universe is the same, Las tres bodas de Manolita can be read independently, although each novel contains details that tie them together.
The plot of the novel takes place in a Madrid devastated by the recent Civil War where the characters try to survive as well as they can amidst the rubble and ashes. Manolita Perales, the central axis of them all and upon which the incidents and vicissitudes which affect them revolve, is a 17 year old girl that, with her father and stepmother in prison, ill and jobless, will have to care for her four younger siblings. She has just left her two little sisters in the care of nuns in Bilbao. Likewise, her brother Toñito is hiding in a flamenco bar in the center of Madrid, where he took refuge after being pursued by the police during the war. Manolita starts to visit the Porlier prison to give solace to those interned there for defending the ideals of the Republic. And it is there where she finds Silverio, “el Manitas”, who will try to help her to fix some broken copy machines bought by the resistance to print pamphlets, but whom she first has to marry to satisfy the prison chaplain, who is running a lucrative marriage business on the side. Manolita is a girl who at first seems helpless but she will become a strong and determined woman whose growth and development we witness with emotion.
As the narrative focal point of the novel, Manolita, ironically known as “Miss Don’t Count on Me,” gives rise to various parallel stories that are developed in the novel. Her shoulders support a framework of stories that are interconnected with extraordinary ability, stories whose intricate and dense workings are resolved perfectly, in various narrative voices. The choral tone of the novel offers the reader a kaleidoscopic vision of the post-war period, but the warmth of this multiplicity of the voices prevents the loss of the concrete sense of the intimate and personal.
These stories are told from the point of view of the losers, of those whose divergence from Fascist ideas involved facing extremely difficult situations such as the theft of children, political persecution, and moral corruption.
Manolita did not participate in the conflict, but she does suffer its consequences. The ideological divergence is analyzed as a weed with dangerous roots that influences the entire social milieu, that is why the daily life of someone like Manolita is so deeply affected, that is why an adolescent is obliged to face, so quickly and radically, situations that require deep maturity. Cruelty thus acquires heterogeneous nuances, and with that, the denunciation of inhumanity achieves great impact.
The author uses two narrative voices throughout, alternating the chapters in which Manolita, in the first person, narrates her quotidian life, and those in which an omniscient narrator relates the past history of the rest of the characters, and takes these “mini-novels” into the present. Adding to the density is the admixture of historical fact and fiction. Of the 6 chapters in the novel, two are nonfiction. Three are based on real events from which the author weaves Manolita’s story: the weddings arranged by the prison chaplain of Porlier, the printers which the Communist Party managed to smuggle in pieces into Spain and were seized in 1942, and the child slaves of Francoism, based on the real story of Isabel Perales..
Las tres bodas de Manolita is an immense, intense and stratified work that relates comprehensively the social life of postwar Madrid and helps us understand the thought of the vanquished. Almudena Grandes, like Pérez Galdós and the classic Russian novelists, has written an intra-historical novel that deftly documents the customs and social life of that age. Her characters are sketched with great care and detail, and their lives are narrated in their total complexity. For those reasons, this novel, and indeed the whole cycle, deserves to be translated into English.
