María Teresa León knew Camus, met Stalin and was cruelly lost to Alzheimer’s. Now her memoir is being republished.

Towards the end of a long life that was more eventful, more peripatetic and more exquisitely chronicled than most, María Teresa León came to a painful conclusion.

“Living,” wrote the Spanish author and anti-fascist activist, “isn’t as important as remembering. What a horror to have nothing to remember; to leave nothing behind you but blank tape.”

The lines are from León’s 1970 autobiography, Memoria de la Melancolía (Memory of Melancholy), which has been republished to mark its 50th anniversary and to rekindle interest in a writer whose literary achievements have all too often been overshadowed by those of her second husband, the poet Rafael Alberti.

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