Contra el olvido: Todo lejos, de Alfons Cervera

Todo lejos (2015), the last novel by Alfons Cervera, recalls the arrest of a group of anti-Franco activists in the early seventies, a hardly known event in Spanish history that was probably silenced by political authorities. This paper will study the novel from a twofold perspective: on the one hand, the importance of memory. The novel has a choral structure of different voices that remember events that could potentially be identified with the author’s autobiographical memories. On the other hand, the novel aims to report the atmosphere of terror created by Franco’s dictatorship, the use of violence as a political weapon, and the accusation of dissidence suffered by many groups and individuals.