Frankenstein's mother

The portrait of a country more Catholic than Catholics and that is always right 1954. Germán Velázquez returns to Spain from his exile in Switzerland, where he has spent more than half of his life, to work in the women’s asylum in Ciempozuelos. There he meets Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira, a paranoid, eugenic, intelligent, brilliant parricide, whom he met in his father’s clinic at the age of 13 and who fascinated him to the point of becoming a psychiatrist. And he also finds himself with a country that he no longer recognizes: the roundness of the sun, the humiliated heads of the women, other flags, other names in the streets, fear, silence…

A pact with Almudena Grandes herself led us to adapt this novel, the fifth of the Episodios de una guerra interminable, set in the 1950s during Franco’s regime, to a women’s asylum, the portrait of a country where social and ideological differences are what determine human relationships. The Mother of Frankenstein is an extraordinary novel for very different reasons. The first: because the portrait of Spain in the 1950s seen by someone who was educated, studied and grew up outside this country is fantastic. Everything that is normal in any other context happens here in a peculiar way and loaded with an always twisted intention, and this is what happens to Germán when he arrives at the Ciempozuelos women’s asylum. Oh my, everything you need to think about before talking to anyone, especially with a person of the opposite sex!