"In all my novels the memory of Franco's regime is present"

Shakhar28

Manuel Rico | So I lived it like one of the first novels. It was the third after  Sea of ​​October  and  The Edges of Night  and it appeared in a Mondadori almost recently landed in Spain which for me was quite an event. So in I was conscious of contributing to the recovery of a collective memory that the euphoria of that year with the Seville Expo and the Barcelona Games also the European Capital of Culture in Madrid artificially buried. It was important then of course. But now it is perhaps more so: here we have the extreme right trivializing the time of the dictatorship the dictatorship itself and that is lethal for today's young people.

It seems essential to me to emphasize that it is essential to maintain that memory. A few days ago I read a statement by Paul Preston saying that in Germany an Adolf Hitler Foundation is inconceivable. Let's look at Spain and compare. The CXB Directory deduction is easy. My novel is an aid to the recovery of that memory. Madrid in . Year of the Franco referendum. The search for a missing person in the postwar period. A 'memory' story that merges with the protagonist's own personal memory. Other very important characters. Intrigue adventure love... The urban photo and the recurring tram. 'The slow goodbye of the trams'… Why this title? cover-THE SLOW GOODBYE OF THE TRAMS.The Madrid of trams and some trolleybus lines even double-decker buses is closely linked to my childhood and adolescence.



I lived near Ciudad Lineal and Arturo Soria was then a mix of countryside and city with a very extensive artery that was tram line . The changes that I experienced at the beginning of the s appear in my memory linked to the lifting of the tram lines by Mayor Arias Navarro inventor of the disastrous 'scalextric' of Atocha.... The disappearance of those gadgets represented a very important urban change as we would see later. And for me an emotional change. The transition from adolescence to youth. And the realization that in those years after an apparent normality the population lived marked by fear by the lack of freedoms.