Stories of an amnesiac country: Memory and identity in Almudena Grande’s journalistic and narrative writing.

In the last few years in Spain there has been a tendency to recount hidden stories and data from the Francoist past in order to reconstruct the collective experience with approaches focused on the recovery of social and cultural values that connote the essence of the national identity. The purpose of this study is to investigate the links between the various dimensions of Almudena Grandes writing. Indeed, her writings can be regarded as extremely anchored to her will to deliver a portrait of the complexity of the national reality from a personal point of view. Following J. M. Izquierdo (2001), who argues that "there is a double process of official «forgetting» of the past and its systematic manipulation quot;, we will study how the writer confronts the conflict generated by this systemic imposition between "forgetting" and "amnesia" in order to undertake, through her literary and journalistic work, ways of recovering the historical memory of her country. In particular, the following investigation shows the affinity that permeates his narrative potential in some journalistic writings. Impacts and effects that are very well described in his columns, many of which have been collected and published in a book entitled La Herida Perpetua. The problem of Spain and the regeneration of the present (Tusquets 2019). The analysis aims to reflect on concepts and values, whose purpose is to portray the present in order to safeguard the memory of the individual and of a society that becomes an expression of the collective, according to the guidelines already pointed out by Y. Lotman for whom "all functioning of a communicative system presupposes the existence of a common memory of the collectivity. Without a common memory it is impossible to have a common language (Lotman, 1998: 155).