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Carme Ri era's novel En el ?ltimo azul ? published first in Catalan in 1994 and then in 1996 in a Castilian translation prepared by the author herself ? presents the story of a group of crypto-Jews [chuetas) living in seventeenth-century Majorca whose failed attempt to flee persecution leads to disaster.1 Published shortly after 1992 ? the five-hundredth anniversary of, amongst other things, the official Edict of Expulsion of the Jews ? this novel counters the multifaceted positive commemorative discourse ofthat year (in which Spain hosted a number of significant cultural events that celebrated 'Spain's coming of age as a modern, democratic European nation-state')2 with a representation intended to reveal some of 1492's darker consequences.3 The novel, awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1995 (the first novel in a language other than Castilian to receive it), is based on historical events that took place between 1687 and 1691, but, as the author suggests, in her retelling of them in the genre of the historical novel a significant degree of poetic licence has been exercised. First and foremost, En el ?ltimo azul is a moving, novelistic account of the life and death of a persecuted community. As Akiko Tsuchiya has observed, however, it is also 'a complex hybrid of history and fiction'.4 It is a novel dominated by questions regarding the relationship between official history and individual and collective memory, by questions regarding the relationship between past and present, and by questions as to where fiction might fit within these debates. Indeed, much of the critical discussion of the novel has centred upon what En el ?ltimo azul, as a work of fiction, adds to the historical account of those events. Furthermore, almost every critic who has written of this novel has linked it to some aspect of the present, either the context in which the novel was published or the critic's own present, for, as Carlos Garcia Guai has argued, the historical novel alludes frequently to the present in its evocation of the past and 'atrae ese pasado evocado hacia el presente, mostrando la semejanza de uno y otro'.5 There can be no question that making reference to historical memory was extremely relevant at the time the novel was written and is even more so now in the current Spanish political climate, with the passing of the Law of Historical Memory in 2007 and the growing demand for recognition of the victims of the Civil War and the Franco regime. Critics have viewed the text in very different ways: for Janet P?rez, En el ?ltimo azul presents a kind of historiography in line with the concepts propounded by the New Historicists.6 Neus Carbonell argues, applying post-colonial theories of the subaltern, that it might be read as 'a narrative of resistance from the ethical perspective of the responsibility for the repressed',7 while Tsuchiya analyses it as an expos?, partaking equally of history and fiction, of the discursive mechanisms used by the Spanish Inquisition to produce a disciplinary society.8 For G?raldine Cleary Nichols, En el ?ltimo azul embodies 'some of the "infinidades de historias" behind the capital-h Historical accounts of the last autos de fe [sic] resulting in loss of life in Majorca', and thus unsettles the official documents' monological presentation of the chuetas' last years, thus restoring 'some vestige of speech to the silenced'.9 Reyes Coll-Tellechea, on the other hand, has linked the novel to anxieties relating to the full entry of Spain into the European Union and the ethnic intolerance and genocide surrounding the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.10 In particular, the critics have found it irresistibly tempting to read the narrative in juxtaposition with the three-page 'Afterword/Nota' at the end of the novel where the author sets out some of her aims in the production of the text. Here Riera also lays out briefly what she understands to be the salient differences between fictional and historical narrative and positions her text in relation to these two poles. …

Carme Riera’s En el último azul (1994): An encounter with Spain’s conflicted past