"The revolution will be feminist or it will not be" a phrase inspired by Ché Guevara that I bring up and that should be understood in the case of this novel as a necessary historical reconsideration of the figure of women. History is what it is, but almost always has been written omitting the part of responsibility corresponding to women. Because not a few fundamental movements for freedom and equality have been narrated in a female voice, serving as the maximum example of this egalitarian desire of each other.
There is a long way to go. But what less than starting from literature, composing novels that reveal both heroes and heroines from other times when feminism sounded as utopian as the most necessary of revolutionary horizons.
The First World War left aside a neutral Spain on which nothing seemed to go in the conflict. Only that every war ends up splashing its violence, poverty and misery to an environment as close as Spain was, surrounded by countries that did participate such as France or Portugal.
The history of wars teaches us that the worst of all conflicts comes when the end is near. All of Europe was devastated back in 1918 and to make matters worse, the Spanish flu took advantage of the movement of troops and the deplorable food to attack the most painted.
Between hardships and fronts, we meet Gracia from Barcelona, a proactive revolutionary woman. The city of Barcelona lived those days transformed into a hotbed where riots were brewing and where the most hidden tasks of espionage were carried out. And it is for all this that Gracia is forced to leave her city.
Leaving Spain towards the north in the middle of the war did not augur a better destiny. But Gracia found in Bordeaux a passionate story of love, loyalty and hope, amid the shadows of a decaying world that seemed destined to be consumed like paper on fire.
With an aftertaste of romantic epic similar to that of the recent novel The summer before the war, and with the necessary doses of idealism of any protest novel, we find an exciting book, with a brilliant rhythm of accurate descriptive brushstrokes, to make us live in that dark continental awakening to the twentieth century.
You can now buy the novel The Spring Epidemic, the new book by Empar Fernández, here: