Stuff enough for novels

The writer Manuel Rico asks in El País why so few novels are written about life under Franco's dictatorship in Spain. So many topics from the time have hardly been touched on, Rico comments. "For example I'm thinking of daily life in the 1950s and 60s, of the life - and the conscience - of a dormant society living in a fictitious peace while the prisons were full of political prisoners and everyone was used to silence, self-censorship and fear. Are these memories not a part of us, and an explanation for the fears and complexes we have today? Why do we accept or even applaud when Ian McEwan describes his protagonists' protests against the Vietnam War, but then call Spanish authors pamphleteers when they write about student protests in the 1960s or the major political and social conflicts that tore apart the fabric of society under Franco in the 1960s?"

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