"We wanted to get there on Sunday to go together to Grandma's house." With these words begins the narrator, a girl, telling the grandchildren's Sunday deceit with her grandmother, how the grandmother prepared the puff, how she took the anis cup.
In this first part of the book, the beginning of most sentences will be “I remember it.” And she'll remember what grandma was like, how she dressed, her hugs -- but also how grandma told them about what happened in the war. “I remember that, according to my grandmother, there was no desire to play in the streets during the war. I remember that, according to my grandmother, in the war you couldn't eat cookies or cakes. Remember that in the war (…) his grandfather was killed (…) that in 1936 the days had been exhausted.”
Her relationship with the grandmother is described in a simple and soft tone, in which it is also explained that the grandmother died without knowing where her grandfather's bones were. That is, the book "Smoke in the Grandmother" is the drama of war, the drama of the loser, a correct and appropriate way to approach children, from a poetic tone, through simple and suggestive illustrations that join writing, narration that tells us the ancestral history of the family. In this sense we have a moving book, because the simplicity and the eyes of innocence show us the affection of the grandmother and the pain that the grandmother has kept inside for years.
Grandma's got the book "kea," but it's also curious because we have two narratives of a story. The first is the one we discussed earlier. The second counts as a narrative for older children (and also for adults). We are told the story (or rather the murder) of Antoni Benaiges i Nogués. The story of the grandmother's husband from the previous album. How he was arrested for being a teacher and wanting to educate children in freedom. Brutal historical homicide. Because, as Dani Martirena says in the final note of the book, “it is often that reality is more raw than fiction itself.”
A determined commitment by the authors and a book recommended, from the literary point of view, even to begin to bring the topic of memory to children.
Party and recreation. Oral History of Rock Radical Vasco
Javier 'Jerry' Corral
Books, 2025
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Javier Corral ‘Jerry’ was a student of the first Journalism Promotion of the UPV, along with many other well-known names who have... [+]