Cartografía para los recuerdos: Barcelona y la(s) memoria(s) de la posguerra en Los mares del Sur de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Abstract

As a cultural and ideological artifact, literature is an important vehicle for the “reframing” of memories. Published in the Spain during the transition, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s novel Los mares del Sur (1979) is a politics of memory that not only aims to fictionally represent some accounts of recent historical events, but also shows the ontological specificity of remembering in the context of official amnesia. In doing so the book allows us to see interesting reflections on the importance of the urban changes as “stabilizers” of memories, the tension between memory as a “reconstruction” or as an “irruption” of the past, and on the links between individual memory and social memory.