When the Irish writer Audrey Magee (Enniskerry, 1966) was 18 years old, she went to live in Germany for a few months. "I had grown up with a very simplistic Anglo-American view of the war and of Germans: the idea that everything that had happened was because 'they were German,' as if it were an inherent condition and not the result of a political structure," she explains. It was the beginning of an idea she would mull over until she wrote her first novel, The undertaking, which has been translated into Catalan by Josefina Caball and published under the title El compromís (Periscopi / Sexto Piso). Living among Germans dismantled her prejudices: “I realized that they were extremely kind people, who had no horns or devil's tail.” It was the 80s and there were things that the author of La colònia (Periscopi) recognized because they were shared. "There was the silence that I understood perfectly because I had grown up with it, and the silent reproach of children who had inherited the legacy of the Holocaust," she says.

Ireland is a factory of writers who are not afraid to mix “literature and politics”: perhaps because they are braver, perhaps because they have experienced more hardship, perhaps because they have such a powerful literary tradition (with an imposed language, but that would be another debate) they have the tools and the will for anything. And such a entrenched and painful conflict as has occurred in this country yields results like the work of Audrey Magee, whose poignant The Colony (Periscopi, 2024) we already knew, and from whom we now receive The Commitment, an earlier novel, but no less interesting or current for that: the typical historical novel that makes you think, a lot, about what we would do today if a war broke out. The answers it gives are quite distressing: surely we are all more selfish and submissive than we imagine.