“An uncomfortable Survivor” – socially critical author Chirbes dead – Tiroler Tageszeitung Online

Madrid (APA / dpa) – Rafael Chirbes was an uncomfortable observer. The Spanish writer, who died on Saturday at the age of 66 years, described with biting sharpness the dark side of his country – from the dictatorship of the Franco regime to the real estate crisis and the corruption scandals of our time. “That’s not pessimistic, this is the reality,” he once said.

In the years of the economic boom, the Spaniards wanted the dark sides of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) know little. Chirbes’ novels were abroad – especially in Germany – at times more successful than in the homeland of the author. For his success in the German market, the writer had a simple explanation: “(The literary critic) Marcel Reich-Ranicki once a novel by me publicly recommended. This has helped me in Germany. “

Chirbes had got involved as a student in a left group in the fight against the Franco regime. He was arrested and detained for months. “He was like the main characters in his novels an uncomfortable survivor who did not want to forget the past,” the newspaper “El Mundo” paid tribute to the author in an obituary. “In the literature, he discovered the best way to monitor those years in which only a few wanted to change a country that had made themselves comfortable in the dictatorship.”

The novel trilogy “The long March “(1996),” The case of Madrid “(2000) and” Old Friends “(2003) deals with the time of the Franco regime, the dictatorship ended and the transition to democracy. “Crematorium” (2007) deals with the building boom, the destruction of natural landscapes and corruption in the period prior to the bursting of the “housing bubble”. He also served as a template for a TV series. “She was very well done, but they had little to do with my book,” said the author. His subsequent work “On the shore” (2013) is linked directly with it and portrays a country in hangover, in which the economic and financial crisis has the boom to a sudden end.

“Chirbes’ death is a terrible shock (for Spanish literature), “his publisher Jorge Herralde told the newspaper” El Pais “. “He was a man of an exceptional moral integrity.” Chirbes, son of a railway worker, was raised in an orphanage. His father died when the son was four years old, the mother lived in poverty. The author described himself as a Marxist, but engaged no longer after the end of the Franco dictatorship in politics. He lived for several years retired, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast in the village of Beniarbeig north of Alicante.