Lessons Learned in Almudena Grandes’ 2012 Bildungsroman El lector de Julio Verne (The Reader of Jules Verne): Gender, Repression, and Resistance

The protagonist of Almudena Grandes’ postwar Bildungsroman observes gendered models (of toxic hegemonic masculinity and anti-hegemonic resistance) ultimately to become a resistant, a political prisoner, and a candidate in the first democratic elections. This chapter investigates the novel’s gendered spaces and resistance techniques. During the bloody Triennium of Terror (1947–1949) in Jaén, the young son of a guardia civil, Nino, is an auditory witness to psychological torture, including sexual intimidation of female prisoners. The violent, hierarchized toxic masculinity of the barracks stands in contrast to the secluded female space inhabited by a collective of female anti-fascists whose influence prompts the protagonist’s lifelong political engagement that combats the mandated forgetting of erasure and perpetuates the memory of the resistance in Sierra Sur.