“Some people have been reading my book as if it were the new ‘Mein Kampf,’ and they then are writing to me to say that they are disappointed to find that it has neither the strong political message that they had hoped for, nor the content that they had heard about,” she said. According to Pablo Simón, a politics professor at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (who is not related to the writer), “Feria” has fueled Spain’s political debate because “even if it is a novel and not a political treaty, the book ascertains that the current generation is worse off than the previous ones, which is a claim that is easy for politicians to use, even if it is not necessarily based on facts.”He added: “Our parents may have had fewer ambitions and faced less uncertainty, but it doesn’t mean that they were better off, and nostalgia also makes us forget the difficult and sordid aspects of the Spain of the 1970s and 1980s, including high drug consumption and joblessness during a very complicated industrial reconversion.”Having recently become a mother, Ms. Simón now lives with her son and her partner, Hasel-Paris Álvarez, in Aranjuez, a town outside Madrid where her parents also live. While raising her child and writing for El País, Ms. Simón said, she had been trying to protect her family from the toxic comments her book has triggered on social media, from both the right and the left. “We unfortunately live in a time when some people offend just for the sake of it, even if it gets nonsensical, to the point that I got attacked as a Red Fascist,” she said.

Source: New York Times January 23, 2022 18:12 UTC