Spanish bestselling author Julia Navarro has published a new novel, "Una familia moderna" ("A Modern Family"), moving away from the intrigue and historical fiction that made her famous to tackle contemporary debates including gender identity and migration through the story of one family.
Published by Plaza & Janés, the book is Navarro's tenth novel and went on sale on September 15 in Spain, the United States and Latin America, with an initial print run of 300,000 copies.
In an interview with the EFE news agency, Navarro said society today has become more infantile and banal.
Navarro, who was born in Madrid in 1953, said all her novels are contemporary, but that this one is different because, perhaps driven by the journalist she still carries inside her, she plunges directly into many of the major public debates of the present day. She said she did not know how her regular readers would respond, but that a writer cannot keep producing the same book forever.
She said she would be cheating if she did not write, at every point in her career, what she felt she wanted to say. Writing to please readers had no place in her plans, she said, adding that what she wants is to open a form of communication in which everything can be discussed.
Navarro is known for bestselling novels such as "La Biblia de Barro" ("The Clay Bible") and "Dime quién soy" ("Tell Me Who I Am"), which established her as one of Spain's leading writers of historical and intrigue fiction.
The plot of 'A Modern Family'
The novel centers on a family formed by Martha, a former ballet dancer in her seventies, and Thomas, a well-known philosopher, along with their daughter Felicitas, who runs a successful digital channel and is a single mother by choice. The household also includes granddaughter Penny, a provocative and unsettled teenager, and Lucía, a Honduran domestic worker who has supported the family's caregiving for more than thirty years.
Aging and the pursuit of youth
One of the themes running through the book is aging. Navarro said she was inspired by Nora Ephron's book "I Feel Bad About My Neck" to create Martha, the novel's narrator and central character, as a woman obsessed with growing old, particularly with the appearance of her arms.
She said the search for eternal youth is closely tied to the desire to hold off death and to pursue immortality. She described these as eternal questions that have followed humankind since the beginning of time, even though there now seem to be more technological tools available to chase them.
Political correctness as 'brutal censorship'
Navarro said the central theme running beneath "Una familia moderna" is the woke movement and political correctness. She said society today is more infantile and banal, appearing freer while steadily losing freedoms by becoming increasingly politically correct.
She described political correctness as a new form of censorship, one she called absolutely brutal, and said she found it monstrous that a person could be cancelled simply because their ideas did not match those of others.
To illustrate her point, she cited the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio, who was convicted of killing a man, asking whether his paintings should be destroyed because he was a murderer. She also pointed to the fact that most archaeological remains from antiquity, including those in Athens, were built using slave labor, asking whether the Acropolis should be blown up for that reason. She said that judging everything ever created by today's standards might leave society with nothing at all.
Navarro also criticized what she called some minorities that, after having been persecuted and silenced themselves, now wanted to do the same to others. She said fundamentalists of any kind frighten her somewhat, whether they are 80 years old or 15.
On migration and the Ceuta crisis
Navarro, who worked for years as a journalist, also addressed the mass arrival of migrants in Ceuta, a Spanish autonomous city on the north coast of Africa, at the end of July. She said everything had been handled badly there, and that the worst mistake was denying the truth, since governments fall when they deny it.
She said it was literally impossible that no one had known 80,000 people were walking toward the border, adding that both Morocco and Spain were aware, and that figures of 50,000, 80,000 or 100,000 people are nothing like a hundred people.
Navarro has previously explored immigration and uprooting in novels including "El niño que perdió la guerra" ("The Boy Who Lost the War") and "De ninguna parte" ("From Nowhere"). She said the history of humanity is a history of migration, even though there is now more news coverage of it, and that she supports not placing obstacles in the way of immigrants.
She said the issue is not about building walls and closing borders, but about finding ways to engage with migrants' countries of origin and to help change the conditions that force people to leave in the first place.
