„El desafío narrativo de la memoria. Las autoficciones de Julio Llamazares”. In: Agnieszka August-Zarębska, Trinidad Marín Villora (Hgs.): Guerra, exilio, diáspora. Aproximaciones literarias e históricas. Wrocław: WUW, 2014, 113-120.

The narratives of the leonese author Julio Llamazares (*1955) are part of the nueva narrativa española. All his novels set their focus on the topic of memory; be it individual or collective. With his preference for marginal groups or events, Llamazares has consolidated his position among the most significant writers who contribute with their texts to the contemporary discussion on the memoria histórica. His latest novel, El cielo de Madrid (2005), broadens the thematic horizon of his literary production: the narrator of this novel concentrates on his memories of the 1980s in Madrid, the time of the Movida.            This presentation has a narratological focus and intends to describe the narrators of the novels of Llamazares and thus to take into consideration the omnipresent question of the relativity of one’s memory/memories. Bearing in mind the general observation that in all of the novels the narrators wrap up their narrations in a metafictional discourse, this investigation strives to elaborate on the aspect of the texts’ autofictional narrative strategies. Especially in the context of the discussion on memory, the genre of the autofiction gives space to represent the complexity of the postmodern subject (sujet dispersé). By forming a playful oscillation between referentiality and fictionality, which is based on the possibility and impossibility of equating the narrator with the empiric author, Llamazares’s texts constitute an aesthetic counter-position to the idea of the death of the author (Barthes, Kristeva).