Arde Madrid under the memory of the bombs of the Civil War; Arde Madrid by the violence, the folly and the oppression of the Francoism; By the nights of false freedom and by the dawns of despair, destruction and drugs of the Movement; Madrid burns by the forgetfulness of the common graves, of the betrayals and the murders; For democracy built on the shameful silence of all; Arde Madrid by the economic crisis, the evictions, the helplessness and the humiliation of the excluded ones; Madrid burns because of the greed, the voracity, and the pettiness of a few; But it also burns in the memory of a child and in his mind-boggling imagination; It burns in a whale that rots in the middle of summer; Burns in the beauty of a schizophrenic girl; Burns in the suicides and in the artists destroyed by the disease, the heroine and the madness; It burns in the defeat and melancholy of a whole generation; It burns in the attraction for the emptiness of a homosexual adolescent and by its emotional and physical collapse; Burns in Paris; It burns like a memory that burns in exile; Burns in the reunion of a city and country devastated by the time; Burns in this book, and in the story of a possible Spain, a possible history, the contemporary end of the rest of Europe, and its failure. Arde Madrid is the novel of a French writer to whom the recent history of Spain stripped of its country and its language, but not of its ferocious, brutal, devastating memory.

Author: Kiko Herrero
Translation: Luis Núñez Díaz