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The writer and musician Fidel Moreno. Tamara de la Fuente
A Portrait of the Wild Life at Forty in the Novel 'Better Than Dead'

A Portrait of the Wild Life at Forty in the Novel 'Better Than Dead'

Eroticism and humour with a backdrop of fidelity, speculation, and drugs for erectile dysfunction to recreate the everyday life of the contemporary in Fidel Moreno's new work

Doménico Chiappe

Madrid

Lunes, 13 de enero 2025, 00:10

A 41-year-old unemployed man faces his partner's insistent request, a real estate businesswoman, to have a child. The flat where Julio lives with Casilda, a gift from his father-in-law, already has a room for the baby. But he prefers to consume hallucinogens and drugs for erectile dysfunction, continuing without ambitions or responsibilities. Until he assumes the presidency of the residents' association and deals with the squatters, among whom is the young Sara. The novel 'Better Than Dead' (Random), by Fidel Moreno, addresses a reality so contemporary of middle age in Spain that it intertwines with real estate speculation, the pandemic, and alternative therapies.

Is turning forty the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end? "We are a generation that has almost transitioned directly from adolescence to old age, and there is a crisis that occupies us from forty to fifty," Moreno (Huelva, 1976) responds. "We have had children late or delayed developing a profession due to job insecurity, among other things that accumulate... which allows one to pretend to still be an adolescent. Until from forty onwards, something else begins."

As a portrait of those living in the illusion of eternal youth, but without giving up the comfort of income, Moreno develops with a hilarious and agile prose a plot not devoid of underlying sadness, which leads to reflection. A style he successfully employed, before this debut in fiction, in his essay 'What Are You Singing to Me? A Century of Songs' Memory'.

"Without a sense of humour, it is difficult to understand the reality of what happens to us," assures the author. "If something is missed today in cultural and political debates, it is a bit of that distance that humour gives you, people have become so fundamentalist that it is hard to disagree without being turned into a heretic. Laugh a little, one feels like telling those who take everything so seriously."

Vertically

Alongside postponing childbirth, other themes addressed in 'Better Than Dead' are feminism, political polarisation, and migration, which in one way or another settle between the walls of that couple. "As if we were soldiers in a war full of trenches, housing, gender equality, political regeneration, or job insecurity are not abstract topics of a television debate. They are problems that directly affect us in our daily lives," Moreno reflects. "The protagonist tries to escape somehow, but he does not succeed, because, inevitably, he is a child of his time and is full of contradictions."

A precocious reader of the collection La Sonrisa Vertical, directed by Luis García Berlanga, Moreno adds eroticism to the paradigm shift of current masculinity. "The empowerment of women has disrupted male reality," states the author, also a musician and 'frontman' of the project El Hombre Delgado. "Men have to adapt, and here we are, without having anything clear about what it means to be a man today. Without any nostalgia for lost power, the men in this novel accommodate themselves to their new situation, sometimes seeking, with deceit and bad practices, a margin of freedom outside female control." Better to accommodate oneself, then, by reading.

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