All of which is compatible with The Last Dream, the essayistic short story which gives the book its title and is about the death of Almodóvar’s mother, Francisca Caballero, who passed away in 1999 at the time of the release of his celebrated film All About My Mother, which was dedicated to her. In seven pages of deeply confessional storytelling, Almodóvar pieces together the elements of his own experience sprinkled across his film career: his family’s impoverished upbringing, the resourcefulness of women, and the strange beautifully described death of a matriarch.

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Along with the final moments of his mother’s life, Almodóvar recounts how Francisca, with his help, would read and write letters for their illiterate neighbours. After some time Pedro notices that she embellishes the stories with details of her own invention. At first he’s unsure about this. “‘But did you see how happy she was?’ countered my mother.” Everyone was overjoyed by her white lies that “remained always a perpetuation of their lives” and it is the way the fiction is complementary with the reality that Almodóvar, writer and filmmaker, argues for because it makes life “more complete, more pleasurable, more bearable.”

Almodóvar’s grieving love and deep respect for his mother is passionately illustrated, and it is clear that he feels his creativity is indebted to his mother: “‘She could draw milk from a stone.’”

When you bear in mind that earlier this year the Venice Film Festival awarded the Golden Lion to Almodóvar for his first English-language film, The Room Next Door, and now he lets loose on the world this impressively variegated and massively dynamic debut collection of stories, it’s not hard to see him as an artist who’s undergoing a renaissance, a resurgence and rebirth of his talent, and it’s not the first of his career.

Well, if you bear in mind how the ribald funster of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! became the grave and tender master of All About My Mother and Bad Education, it’s clear that this is not the first resurrection in a rich, unpredictable lifetime.

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