One day 16 years ago, the writer Rosa Ribas visited Toledo, the hulking Spanish city that looms over the Tagus and stands as a testament to the country’s medieval and imperial power. The friends she was with then suggested they visit another, more contemporary monument that had already become a symbol of another, less glorious era.
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’.”
Almost two decades on, the novel – called Lejos in Spanish – is being published in English under the title Far. Ribas’s English-language debut, translated by Charlotte Coombe, is a dark, satirical and very Spanish love story with echoes of Claudia Piñeiro and JG Ballard.
In it, a half-built housing estate becomes a microcosm of Spanish society during la crisis, a place where the people who bought into the bubble are forced to look on helplessly as their aspirational dreams are curdled by a new economic reality.
“The people in this society are living in a fantasy that they can’t get out of,” says Ribas. “They’re stuck there; stuck in the fantasy of a better life, which was the fantasy that the whole country was caught up in. It was this delirium of a nice house and a little swimming pool and a golf course – all in this country where there’s no water.”
Before long, the miniature society begins to fracture and the well-off residents turn on the squatters who have started living in their crumbling utopia. As the battle lines are drawn, an unlikely affair begins between a man on the run and a lonely woman who finds nightly solace in “Campari and little pills”.
Ribas, who is best known for her noir and detective novels, also drops in a murder and a realistic parody of the jealousy, snobbery and rivalry that can occasionally beset Spanish residents’ associations.
Its central theme, however, is how societies seek to maintain their cohesion by uniting against an “other”. Ribas’s characters believe everything on their little patch would be fine if it was not for the poor people who creep into the development.
“It’s a metaphor for the country; for this need to always create a community that’s against other people,” says the writer. “That can be nationalism; it can be against immigrants, but there always has to be an ‘other’, and there always has to be a fear.”
There is also an all-pervading feeling of suffocation and claustrophobia, despite the vast landscape that surrounds the development. As the unnamed female protagonist notes: “Whoever decided that blue was a cold colour had never seen it burn in the summer sky, did not know what it was to swelter in perennial blue, the eternal days of incandescent fields. They lived under a layer of clingfilm. They were trapped.”
For all the hatred, paranoia and eruptions of violence, however, “there are still moments of hope and friendship and love”, says Ribas. “I wanted that mix.”
The author, who retains an outsider’s eye for her homeland after spending 30 years in Germany, feels little wisdom has been gleaned from what she calls “a collective time of absolute blindness”.
Rents are high, tourist apartments have surged out of control, evictions are still taking place across the country and Spain was recently shocked by the case of two sisters, aged 54 and 64, who killed themselves hours before they were due to be evicted from their flat in Barcelona.
Spain, says Ribas, is always keen to turn the page.
“I get the impression that we’ve learned very little because we’re seeing another construction spike right now,” she says. “When you’re out and about you see all these billboards for new developments – but they’re all luxury flats. There’s no accessible housing for normal people. It’s another bubble that’s all about maximum profit.”
The trip she and her friends made back in 2008 could easily be made today.
“Travel around the country and you’ll see all these dead architectural ruins that are still there but they’ve started building like maniacs again,” says Ribas. “There are all these huge scars but we don’t want to see them.”
Far by Rosa Ribas (Foundry Editions, £12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
