Sounds Familiar

When I was writing about Spain’s crisis literature, I spent two years trying to get my university to order a book by Cristina Fallarás titled A la puta calle. Back then I wasn’t as rooted as I am now, so I had no idea how to get things done. I didn’t get my hands on the book, and as a result I’m only reading it now.

Fallarás is a journalist. When the Great Recession hit Spain, Fallarás was fired from her newspaper. She was 42 and almost 8 months pregnant. Spanish women delay pregnancy a lot, and Fallarás is lucky to have managed two kids. That’s something most Spanish women never achieve.

When she was fired, Fallarás tried to hold on to the hope of recapturing her lost life of middle-class stability. But the recession was separating millions from their jobs. Fallarás and her family gradually slipped into poverty and got evicted. While that was happening, she continued to get invited on all the TV shows with all the stars. Nobody could believe she was in such dire poverty that she had no food except for white rice to put on the table for her children. This book, A la puta calle, is about the lumpenization of middle-class people whose understanding of what life is supposed to be is crushed by sudden and persistent unemployment.

I haven’t finished the book yet but I want to mention that what Fallarás narrates sounds extremely recognizable. Her experience is exactly what happened when the USSR fell apart. People had to start completely new lives with completely new jobs that they didn’t know how to do or find. The entire class system crashed and a new one sprung up instead. Fallarás’s book transmits exactly that kind of a horrified bewilderment of the people whose understanding of how life works betrayed them.

Spain was hit for only 6 years and not permanently like we had been. It’s been better since then. Fallarás found a new job. She perked up to the point of starting Spain’s #MeToo movement and only last month ending an MP’s career for sometimes being moody with his girlfriend which is supposedly terribly abusive. Before you feel bad for the MP, I have to tell you he’s far to the left of AOC and a passionate admirer of Hugo Chávez. Spain, you know? A Communist journalist is destroying a Communist MP because some random chick had a less-than-stellar date.

In any case, my point is that I wish Fallarás’s book had an English translation because the entire neoliberal experience is right there. She’s a very gifted author, and her descriptions of what it feels to become redundant, inessential, and a wasted life are strong.

I really never thought I would ever hear a Westerner describe this experience as their own. It’s such a strange feeling, with all the memories that it brings.

I’ll share more as I keep reading but if you are a Spanish-speaker, you need to read it now, it’s hardcore. I took 2g of melatonin to fall asleep faster, wake up sooner, and get an hour of reading done before I have to go to work. I don’t do that for just any book.