Author Rosa Ribas talks to The Guardian about the inspiration her Noir tale FAR.
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Billed as “the Manhattan of La Mancha”, the town of Seseña was meant to house 40,000 people in blocks that were to rise from the dusty plains 25 miles (40km) south of Madrid. But the project, like so many others across Spain, came to a standstill when the housing bubble blown by an unchecked building boom burst and was followed by the 2008 global financial crisis. What Ribas saw in Seseña knocked her sideways.
“When you walked around, you’d see the blocks where people were living, the blocks that were semi-inhabited, and then all the skeletons of buildings in different stages of completion,” she said. “From one day to the next, they told the workers not to come back the following day. And it all stayed like that.”
As night fell, the Spanish author watched as a handful of lights came on in one block.
“I thought to myself, ‘Is that all the people that are living here?’. There were about three people and all around them were these dark, empty plains. Can you imagine what life must be like there? I thought, ‘This needs a novel’.”
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