Luis Alemany
Updated Thursday, January 25, 2024-16:27
Sergio del Molino: "Felipe González betrayed everything and everyone
The writer
Sergio del Molino
is the winner of the XXVII Alfaguara Novel Prize thanks to the work
The Germans
, a text for which he will receive $175,000 and a sculpture by Martín Chirino.
According to the jury's ruling,
The Germans
"masterfully narrates a very little-known event in the history of Spain, related to the mutation of Nazism" after World War II.
Sergio del Molino (1979), became known among Spanish readers for
The Violet Hour
, a book of testimony about the death of a son.
Empty Spain
, his first non-fiction book, was one of the few books that managed to change public discussion.
After
The Death of the Fishes
, a chronicle of his education in Zaragoza in the 90s, and
Un tal Gonzáles
, dedicated to the legacy Felipe González.
According to Del Molino,
The Germans
is "the most novel novel" of his career, the most clearly narrative, but it connects with the concerns of his previous work:
the past, guilt, family and impunity.
The Germans
begins in 1916, the moment when two ships loaded with 600 Germans from Cameroon arrived in Cádiz.
The crew members intended to take refuge in Spain, a neutral country, rather than surrender to Germany's enemies.
Since then, the descendants of those families have constituted "a caste, a kind of aristocratic body, distanced from the normality of the country."
According to Del Molino, "The novel tells the story of a family of that kind that was disintegrating" but whose members
have to live with an original sin
.
"The past is always lurking to hurt us, to destroy our lives. They believe that the past is dormant but others around them are not unaware of who they are."