For some bizarre reason, right-wing Spanish writers (all one and a half of them) tend to write very left-wing novels. Spain’s first anti-woke novel, as a result, was written by Julia Navarro, who is usually a fairly politically liberal author.
The novel is titled Una familia moderna. Its protagonists are Thomas and Martha, two 70-year-old retirees. Before retirement, Thomas used to be a professor of philosophy, and Martha was a famous ballerina. The renown they achieved in intellectual and artistic circles means that their greatest fear is that somebody would accuse them of being conservative. Being a conservative is a lot more shameful among their acquaintances than being a pedophile, and Martha and Thomas do everything they can to cultivate an image of progressive people and a modern family.
Martha is an indifferent mother who outsourced the raising of her daughter Felícitas to the family’s Latin American maid. Felícitas didn’t manage to form a family of her own and used a sperm bank to have her only child, Penny. She is a social media influencer and has as little interest in raising her daughter as Martha had in raising her. As a result, Penny is promiscuous and drug-addled since age 12, with the full knowledge and consent of her progressive mother and grandparents. Even after Penny drugs and rapes the granddaughter of the family’s maid, her mother and grandparents don’t fully realize the monstrosity that they have created.
I wish the novel were more accomplished in the artistic sense. Its characters tend to direct long woke and anti-woke monologues at each other, which often sounds unnatural and soon enough becomes tedious. The author tries to compensate for her anti-woke views by portraying illegal Latin American migrants as angelical “natural conservatives” who would do well substituting Spaniards. This is clumsily accomplished and quite overdone. Martha, the main character, is portrayed as irredeemably smug, self-involved, and horrid. The Latin American maid, on the other hand, is just as stereotypically sweet, kind, religious, and long-suffering.
The book is a big bestseller. It has its own table in every bookstore I have visited. There is a large appetite among readers for books expressing a conservative worldview. I’m glad that Navarro is doing it, and I hope more authors will join the trend. I have a dream of writing a book titled Conservative Sensibility in the Spanish Novel, but so far there haven’t been many novels that I could discuss in such a book.
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