Desaparecidos, revenants e impostores en la novelística de Juana Salabert

Abstract

This article offers an interpretation of two of Juana Salabert’s novels, Velodromo de Invierno and La noche ciega, in the light of the metaphorical employment of the figures of the disappeared, the revenant and the impostor within them. These spectral presences are traced as central to Salabert’s novelistic contribution to the current memory debates in Spain. Thus, Salabert connects the Spanish Civil War to the Holocaust in a multidirectional way in order to cast into relief the traumatic disappearances that they have left behind and to point to the intersection of Spanish and European history. Finally, Salabert’s aesthetic choices reveal her effort to eschew catharsis in favour of ‘empathic unsettlement’.