I incorporate Juan Francisco Ferrandiz to the plethora of great current narrators of historical novels made in Spain. I am referring to authors of various generations such as Chufo Llorens, louis clog o Jose Luis Corral. Because all of them in their own way, with more or less part of chronicle or fiction, dazzle us with that review of scenarios that we can travel as tourists of time.
In the particular case of Ferrándiz, on many occasions his taste for the legendary as a background awakens that feeling of intrigue from the unknown, crossing any historical setting. Because beyond the facts, the most remote past is covered by that patina of magic, of ancestral myths, of the religious as the foundation of the social and the warlike.
Approaching History in the case of Ferrándiz is to awaken atavistic imaginations loaded with superstitions and beliefs to address the unknown. Characters that move among those distant shadows of our civilization when the mysterious was part of the beliefs and where the first lights of knowledge tried to dispel the heavy mists that hung even from the conscience for a better service of lords, kings and abbots ...
Top 3 recommended novels by Juan Francisco Ferrándiz
The cursed land
In these times, writing a historical novel set in Barcelona runs the risk of arousing suspicion of all kinds, on one side or the other. But in the end, good literature is responsible for destroying prejudices.
Juan Francisco Ferrándiz offers us a story in the middle of the century of the Normans. The IX was a time of false imperial unity sustained in Christianity, whose only theoretical threat was that of the Vikings, little given to unification and less on the basis of institutionalizing beliefs and with a tax tendency.
What would Barcelona be like in those days? To begin with, we have to rethink the current appearance of the Catalan capital, logically. In those days, Barcelona used to be a small isolated city exposed to attacks from the southern Mediterranean at times and from northern Europe at other times.
Bishop Frodoi arrived in the city in 861, with little spirit considering that this was a departure from the imperial nerve centers. However, Frodoi himself extended his stay until his death almost thirty years later.
Several reasons led him to remain on that last frontier of the empire, without intention to thrive in other places of greater demand among his own. In the first place the noble Goda captivated him and involved him in the cause of the city. Because Goda loved Barcelona and expected a better destination for her than the current one.
And the story then becomes an adventure. Faced with the attacks of various peoples and the abuses of their own nobles, more oriented to their own glory than to the revitalization of the city, Frodoi, Goda and other allies that are emerging will insist on glorifying the city, in procuring it a better destiny. .
Different spheres of the city are involved in the cause, from Isembard de Tenes with its noble origins that seem more committed to the perpetuation of the wealthy classes of the moment, to Elisia the innkeeper, intelligent and visionary, a woman convinced that indeed Barcelona deserved other rulers and other considerations.
The water judgment
A sinister rite of biblical conception as a starting point for a story that precisely immerses us in those murky waters of a morality capable of twisting the best principles to hand them over to chance, at the whim of those who rule ...
On a frigid morning in 1170, a cruel trial seals the fates of two families faced by greed and feudal customs. According to tradition, the first-born of the two houses, barely months old, must be submerged in icy water. The one who sinks will be God's chosen, and that will prove his family right.
After the pitiful event, Blanca, the daughter of the noble Ramón de Corviu, is chosen, and Robert de Tramontana, the Condemned, has to watch for years how the victors seize all his possessions. But, in those moments when both struggled to survive, a special and unbreakable union was born between them. And at the same time, in the soul of the loser the desire to reach a fairer world, away from superstitions, germinated.
Years later, the young Robert abandons his lands to dedicate himself to the study of the law in Barcelona and in distant Bologna, while fighting against the hatred and betrayals of his enemies. The discovery of an ancient book makes him a pioneer of a great renovation and he is not alone in the fight; The memory of Blanca, the young woman with whom he shared the infamous judgment of water, always travels in his heart.
The flame of wisdom
The always hidden role of women until very recent times. A plot that carefully polishes that splendor of detail, of firm will, of a woman's determination to move forward as a vital objective but with great symbolic weight in its greatest definition.
Valencia, 1486. ​​After the death of her parents in strange circumstances, the young Irene Bellvent takes charge of En Sorell, the hospital to which her family has dedicated their lives, with the intention of continuing to care for the most disadvantaged in the city. . The laws, however, conspire against her: as a woman, she is considered incomplete and incapable of doing anything on her own, so she is forced to find a husband in order to carry out her plans.
But short-sightedness and prevailing misogyny are not the only problems Irene will have to deal with. Nor are the huge debts that plague the hospital. Her main obstacle is the danger that looms around her beloved En Sorell, an ominous and lethal threat determined to destroy the place and its inhabitants. The fruit of a revenge whose origins date back many years ... to a mysterious female academy that defended such revolutionary concepts as the dignity of women and their moral and intellectual equality.
