In 1987, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán published Historias de política ficción, three short stories in which detective Pepe Carvalho solves three separate crimes triggered by the failed military uprising of 1981. These crimes all involve elderly men who had not forgotten their experience of the Spanish Civil War, and for whom the 23-F represented an intrusion of the past into the present. What Carvalho learns from investigating these murders is the extent of the younger generation's ignorance about the country's past. The silence that separates those who survived the war and the dictatorship from those who have no recollection of any of those experiences is, for the detective, a generational conflict in need of a resolution. The inability to address this gap, Carvalho predicts, will mean the continuation of the past into the present and, ultimately, the impossibility of a future. More than two decades after the publication of these stories, Carvalho's words acquire new significance amid the recent revisiting of the 23-F, especially now that the question of the past, and the present's failure to overcome it, has been transformed into a generational question that challenges the triumphant narrative of the Transición.

Despite the enduring narrative of a successful political transformation of Spain, the overall popular perception of this experience is one of disappointment. A quick read of current newspaper headlines, opinion columns, and digital media emphasises this dissatisfaction; more and more, we see the day-to-day political crises, financial corruption, and social emergencies of contemporary Spain narrated from this perspective. The idea of crisis that underlies recent narratives pits a younger generation against its elders, sometimes as part of a tense filial relationship in which the parents’ time has passed and the future of their progeny has yet to arrive. Certainly this is the view expressed by philosopher José Luis Pardo Torío in a recent opinion column for El País, in which he describes the transition as an affair between fathers and sons. In ‘Padres e hijos: la Transición interminable’, Pardo Torío points to the feeling of the younger generation that their elders have failed in their political experiment, ‘ni liquidaron el franquismo ni establecieron una democracia real’, and that they themselves must start from scratch.