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Spanish realism and the rural novel
Lucía's book club is reading a classic of a strong tradition in Spanish literature: the novel of rural life and its injustices. In the second half of the twentieth century, writers such as Miguel Delibes, Camilo José Cela and others wrote about the countryside of Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia, about the great estates and the people who worked them, about poverty, silence and hierarchy, often in a dry, unadorned realism that left the reader to feel what the narrator did not say. Several of these novels became films and school set texts, and for many Spaniards they are how the rural past is remembered. For Alex, the subject connects with his work: the emptied villages Cierzo tries to revive are what remains of the world those books describe, after the great migrations to the cities. Reading them gives depth to conversations with people like Ramiro and Tomás. For a learner, a Spanish novel is also the place where certain grammar lives. The -se form of the imperfect subjunctive, quisiese, hubiese, is used in speech in parts of Spain but is far more frequent in writing. The pretérito anterior, hubo salido, is almost exclusively literary and somewhat old-fashioned. The narrative present is everywhere, in fiction, history books and journalism. None of these needs to be produced; all of them need to be recognized. Book clubs, clubes de lectura, are a lively institution in Spain, often run by public libraries free of charge, and they are one of the best ways for an advanced learner to read whole books in Spanish, the long-form reading that, as lesson 104 put it, builds the stamina C1 requires.