TOMBLESS VOICES: POSTMEMORY AND GHOST IN MARTA SANZ'S PEQUENAS MUJERES ROJAS

The reconstruction of the Spanish traumatic past is a constant in Marta Sanz's novels, who has dedicated three fictions-Los mejores tiempos (2001), La lecci & oacute;n de anatomia (2008) and DanielaAstoryla caja negra (2013)- to review the Spanish Transition and its "pact of silence". In the same spirit, her latest work, pequenas mujeres rojas (2020), which closes the hardboiled trilogy that she initiated a decade earlier with Black, Black, Black (2010) and Un buen detective nose casa jamas (2012), aims to remove the story of Spanish Civil War and Francoism's victims from oblivion and distorted memory discourses, by means of a narrative proposal closely linked to the notions of "Hauntology" (Derrida 1993) and "Postmemory" (Hirsch 1997). A double theoretical framework that has led to the structuring of the central pages of this paper around three key aspects of the novel: "legacy", which reflects on the opposite natures of the legacies received by both sides of the war conflict; "ghost", which tries to identify the different spectral presences that haunt the novel; and "mass grave", which studies the various works of mourning that are being carried out in the fiction. This analysis aims to demonstrate how Marta Sanz denounces, mainly through a political use of the figure of the ghost and the disposition of a "frame tale" structure in her novel, the persistence of dictatorial trauma in the following generations, as well as the extreme difficulty that any attempt to repair the memory of the victims entails.