These young Spanish writers who make the language of Cervantes dance
A new wave of young authors is flooding Spanish bookstores. Their common thread is their exploration of orality: dialects, slang, and local dialects from yesterday and today intertwine in their novels, bucking a global trend toward language standardization.
Literature is common territory, and the Spanish language even more so, bringing together more than 500 million people on a highway that allows for infinite antics and regionalisms. Authors born in the 1990s, such as Luis Mario (born in Cantabria [in northern Spain] thirty-three years ago), David Uclés (35 years old, originally from Andalusia) or Greta García (born in Seville, 33 years old) have followed in Andrea Abreu's footsteps. In 2020, the latter, a 30-year-old writer from the Canary Island of Tenerife, had, in The Sister I Always Wanted [translated into French by L'Observatoire, 2022], sent grammar rules flying and made a language absent from dictionaries dance.
Is there a certain weariness with globalism, universalism, with what uniforms us in general, and in particular with this literature that seeks to please the greatest number, like Zara or Starbucks? The fact is that, in the same movement, these authors choose to resurrect the orality of their elders and the local language on which they were bottle-fed, in their village, their neighborhood.
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Courrier International
