I really want a phrase that Stuart Hall wrote in the 1980s, and that perfectly explains the worldly contradictions on the left. Hall said (and I imagine writing with an evil anger): “Of course, we are all 100 percent committed. But from time to time – on Saturday morning perhaps shortly before going to the demonstration – we go to Sainsbury’s and, a bit, we are Thatcherians subjects.” Now remove Sainsbury’s and put Eroski or BM or Carrefour or Lidl or El Corte Inglés. Well, Hall serves us to talk about the broad spectrum of the left of Euskal Herria, written a few years ago.

Garazi Arrula has considered this contradictory character of the neoliberal era that we live as raw material for literature. It is composed of eight narratives, Lurraz beste that has just published with Txalaparta, and the writer has followed the path started with the book Gu ordu horiek 2017. I have to accept, I have imagined myself several times writing Arrula with the same perverse laugh that I imagine Halli.

Cross the book the best use of narrative art. The finals that force you to return to the story and the simple life chapters of stories serve to act on an immediate reality. Narrations lead us to the anonymous zeros of contradictions and paradoxes. Searches for apartments for rent in the time when housing has become an investment asset; jealousy among open friendships; regulatory loves within non-normative families; relationships with the incarcerated father and mother of the pandemic; understanding and misunderstanding of generations that give rise to gender dissent occupy their place in the most common day to day.

Thus, the paradoxical character of the affections and desires, the properties and expropriations of neoliberal capitalism is continuously transferred to literature beyond the Earth. Like Hall's thoughts, Arrula's narrations remind us that there's something about all of us in the neoliberal project. If something is going to change, we will have to sit down with that little truth for a while.