The Frozen Heart (El corazón helado)

"This is even more of a doorstopper than the others. Almudena is considered the great muse of Spanish women’s writers. She died in 2021. Rather tragically, Spain lost Javier Marias and Almudena Grandes within 12 months of each other. The weeping and gnashing of teeth at Almudena’s passing was enormous, because she really opened the way for portraying the last 70-80 years, from the dictatorship onwards, from a woman’s perspective. She wrote a lot of books. They all tend to deal with the Spanish Civil War, so I’ve picked Almudena as the portrayer of the Civil War period and of the ‘two Spains,’ which is the expression people use to talk about it. The fact that she does it from a woman’s point of view gives it a depth and a warmth and a sensibility that might not be there in other authors. I could have picked Javier Cercas and Soldiers of Salamis and books like that. But I think Almudena gives the period a human feel that is just incredibly poignant. El corazón helado starts with a funeral. It’s winter, it’s freezing cold and ghastly and the first line is: “The women weren’t wearing tights.” It’s this really evocative, totally simple sense of poverty and the reality of the situation. That’s what I love about this book. Almudena balances politics and the effect that politics has on the population incredibly well. Everybody has a frozen heart! It’s about communities and families being ripped apart. Your heart has to be frozen because suddenly you’re going to go and kill your brother because he’s on the other side. The frozen heart stands for the heart of Spain being ripped out. Yes, the sentences are much shorter than Javier Marías. It’s much less self-consciously literary. That’s another important point about Spanish novels: they do high-low really, really well. I read a review of Berta Isla by Marcel Theroux, where he was arguing that it was a potboiler dressed up as literary theory. And I thought, ‘Yes? Isn’t that what novels are? I love a pot boiler!’ So you can have great tracts where the book is evoking the soul of Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges making you think about language, and then it’s like ‘oh, God, is she going to lose the baby in the park?’ I don’t think they necessarily need to stand in opposition to each other. Theroux also argued that Berta Isla could have been written in a quarter of the number of pages. And I’m thinking, ‘Yes, it could, but that’s the Spanish thing, isn’t it?’ It’s like Spanish churches: they could be bare, but instead they go, ‘Let’s have another 4,300 cherubs over that window.’ It’s about embellishment."