The people of Spain are engaged in a collective exercise in self-numbing, where they’re trying to convince themselves that a world without jobs is the optimal one. It’s easier to come across a giraffe in Spain than a full-time, well-paid, permanent job. People are trying to talk themselves into accepting their post-work reality.
As a result, any random novel one picks up from the recent bestseller list is likely to advance the idea that having a well-paid, comfortable office job is terrible. People who still, by some miracle, happen to have jobs should liberate themselves from this terrible burden. Those who have been trying to make ends meet through a patchwork of badly paid part-time gigs and small welfare payments should consider themselves extremely lucky, because not having a job makes them better-quality humans.
It’s gotten to the point that this is the only kind of novel one reads because that’s all there is. El aire quema by Mónica González Inés it’s about a woman who has a great job, but having a job and enjoying work is the worst thing that a female character in today’s Spanish literature can be. Lúa Cruz is extremely unpleasant, and her life in a beautiful new house with a husband and a child, an excellent income, recognition, prestige, and expensive business trips is portrayed as pure horror. The novel clearly aims to make middle-aged women who have no jobs, barely any income, no family, and who live with roommates in crappy rented apartments at the age of 38 feel superior, precisely by virtue of never being able to enjoy everything that Lúa has.
This subgenre is the opposite of Soviet literature, where people were supposed to derive enormous enjoyment from work, and they lived for their jobs. The Soviet literature in question was, of course, manipulative and aimed at inspiring people to donate free labor to the state. But the post-work literature that is currently so popular in Spain is equality manipulative. And honestly, it’s a lot more depressing than anything, than Stakhanovite novels in the USSR. It keeps beating people over the head with the idea that working is terrible, having a job is an unbearable imposition, having children is an even worse one, and the only desirable state for a human being is to do nothing except scroll social media.
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