Anne L. Walsh

The Shifting Centre: A Futuristic View of Madrid in Rosa Montero’s Lágrimas en la lluvia

As economic crisis rages in Europe and further afield, Spain continues to find itself on the margins and struggles with the implications of missing opportunities, both financial and cultural. Recent fiction emerging in Spain has used different means to articulate and come to terms with the notion of Spanish identity in a changing world. This article looks at one such effort, Rosa Montero’s latest novel, Lágrimas en la lluvia (Seix Barral, 2011), a novel that seems to mark a change of direction for the author in terms of genre. However, it also continues the author’s search for meaning, paralleled by her replicant protagonist, Bruna Husky, in a instantly recognizable, though futuristic, Madrid where themes of memory (both false and real), survival, death, hatred and suspicion of ‘the other’ are a constant and bring into focus the existential question of what it means to be human.