Luna Lunera
Luna Lunera is a 1999 novel by Rosa Regàs Páges.
Alongside other works by Rosa Regàs, her novel “Luna Lunera” also won a prize in 1999: “El premio Ciutat de Barcelona de novela en castellano” (Prize of the City of Barcelona for a novel in Castilian ). Her work was honored because Regàs, with her narrative language , was able to depict the dark period of the Spanish Civil War from the perspective of general memoria . It should also be noted that she published the novel exactly 60 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War.
content
Overall, the novel is about four grandchildren who remember the history and fate of their family on their grandfather's deathbed. Her fate was greatly influenced by this authoritarian man who believed he was a messenger of God. The problems in their childhood are told through the voices of the four grandchildren who had to live under the supervision of their grandfather. The main narrator is Anna. The four children have grown up on their grandfather's deathbed and are trying to complete the puzzle of their past. They reconstruct the story of a broken family separated by the Spanish Civil War and their grandfather. Because when the civil war broke out, the children were sent abroad. When they meet again in their grandfather's house after the war, they first have to overcome their language barrier in order to then bring their hushed past to light. Her mother is fighting to get her out of this dictatorial surveillance. Most of the children’s stories are told by the kitchen women, who face heavy fines.
In the course of the grandchildren's childhood, the grandfather's house empties more and more, because he lost his children in the war or cast them out afterwards. He had also cast out the father and mother of the children because they had been on the “wrong” side (that of the Republicans) in the civil war. The children live in a "madhouse" as the survivors of the family are traumatized by the war. The grandfather tries to erase the memories of the grandchildren and impress them with his story. But the wrestling of the individual past fails. After death, the grandchildren take revenge on their grandfather and desecrate his corpse. This concludes the memoria and the children can carry out their idea of a life that they can determine themselves.
In Regàs' novel, women play an important role as guardians of memory. Everything points to a closed, oppressive and masculine world. Violence is mentioned, including against women, with which Rosa Regàs wants to illustrate the post-war period. But the light in the courtyard and the title “Luna Lunera”, a well-known Spanish folk song, symbolize the path to liberation, happiness and hope of the grandchildren who long for their grandfather's death. This authoritarian man symbolizes in the work of Regàs the dictatorial system under Franco , which lasted until 1975 . Regàs, however, puts his grandfather's death in 1965 , thus showing the slowly increasing liberation campaigns ten years before Franco's death.
reception
Regàs dedicated this novel to her three siblings. The work is strongly autobiographical , as the author was able to process her own memories of the civil war and the post-war period , which she herself experienced as a child. Rosa Regàs herself says, however, that the novel creates its own reality. She has wanted to write this novel since she was a child and use it to illustrate the horrors of dictatorship and the injustice and cruelty of war. In the book review by Juan A. Masoliver Ródenas in the Spanish newspaper “La Vanguardia” from 1999, it is said that Regàs has managed more than before to combine personal experiences with those of the collective . This time with a personal narrator who is objectified by other narrators. It is not a description or tracing of reality, but a reconstruction with different versions. It is mainly about “Personajes sin historia” (characters without a story). The novel thrives on the strength of the characters and an empty childhood that has to be filled with stories. Instead of documentation, according to “La Vanguardia”, there is the path to liberation and traces that cannot be wiped away. But it is also a living document of this epoch and a mirror of a punished society. The fusion of the testimony of a contemporary witness and ambiguity turn the novel into an autobiography for the reader from his point of view. According to the Spanish newspaper, the most important part that the author wanted to show with her work is the one that shows the means to look into "the other face of the moon, which contains the illumination of the wounded hearts of the Spaniards". So far the novel has only been translated into French.
literature
- Mechthild Albert: On the meaning of the female memory in the current Spanish novel . In: Hispanorama. Journal of the German Association of Spanish Teachers. (DSV), No. 104, pp. 16-20.
- Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer (Ed.): Spanish literary history. Metzler, Stuttgart a. a. 2001.