Really lovely graphic novel about old ladies doing swim class in Barcelona’s Gràcia district.
It’s mostly about the old ladies, a motley crew ranging in age from 69 to 94, speaking Catalan, Spanish or a mixture between them. Their interests, their bodies, their marriages, children, the imposition of grandchildren, the sadness at the lack of children, their neighbourhoods, their taste in shoes. It’s warm, it’s funny, it’s sad, death lurks around the corner.
The gym is also something of a bastion, the grandmas representing a lost era in one of Barcelona’s most gentrified areas and the narrator, who is the author, observes them as someone poised between past and present: she’s local to the area, but also a precarious freelancer, unsure if she’ll become a mother, and inhabits a much more left-wing milieu than the grandmas themselves. Nonetheless she adores them, to the point of writing a graphic novel about them…