I came across this bit of information while researching her new work: what is a Delphine de Vigan novel published in 2021 doing among Spain’s bestsellers in 2026? And why has it stayed there for almost a year? I thought, perhaps it had won an award—the Princess of Asturias Award. A Netflix adaptation has premiered. Has Delphine de Vigan died?!
Then I remembered the fuss around ‘A Little Life’. There you go, some famous person has recommended it. Well, not really. It turns out the phenomenon of ‘The Gratitudes’ (Anagrama) was born exclusively on social media. A book that had been published for four years began circulating from recommendation to recommendation, until it became an unexpected longseller (more than twenty editions already).
But the most curious thing is the chosen work. ‘The Gratitudes’ isn’t exactly the kind of book you’d associate with the booktok community. A novel from Anagrama (with all that literary rigor that implies) about an elderly woman who lives in a care home and begins to lose her speech due to aphasia? A story about old age, dependency, caregiving, and memory?
Whatever the secret of its success—its brevity, its emotional intensity, its phrases to underline and share, its combination of literary quality and accessibility—the fact remains that seeing Delphine de Vigan’s name on sales lists above Freida Mcfadden, Dan Brown or Sonsoles Ónega would be like, I don’t know, the I Can’t Wait track by Phoebe Bridgers ahead of Shakira’s Dai Dai. “Come on, let’s go!”
As expected, the consequences of this phenomenon have already made themselves felt. On the one hand, Anagrama has reissued ‘Nada se opone a la noche’, the novel with which De Vigan made her world-wide debut fifteen years ago. On the other, it has just published ‘The Extras’, the author’s debut as a playwright.
Would the publisher have released a theatre work by De Vigan without this phenomenon? Probably not. Theatrical texts occupy a very minor place in the publishing market and this work has not yet been performed in Spain (in France yes, directed by Valérie Donzelli).
‘The Extras’ is something like a blend between ‘Waiting for Godot’ (“What do we do while we wait?”, one of the characters asks; “Re-read Beckett”, another answers) and the Ricky Gervais series ‘Extras’. Its protagonists are five film extras who go through an endless day of filming, waiting for someone to remember them. The curious thing is that De Vigan knows that world well: to write the play she went undercover as an extra on three different shoots.
From that premise, the author builds a light, melancholic and very metatheatrical comedy (the text breaks the fourth wall and “incorporates” the audience of the theater into the work) that talks about waiting, precariousness and the hierarchies of the contemporary world. The extra occupies a paradoxical position: they are indispensable to make a scene credible, but their job is precisely to ensure that no one notices them. De Vigan uses that contradiction to construct a social metaphor about all those who, despite being indispensable, are doomed to a secondary position.
‘The Extras’ explores the small rivalries and complicities that arise as the five characters kill time, fantasize about landing a “tiny role” or simply try to reach the end of the day. It is a witty, funny piece and far more substantial than its initial lightness might suggest. If the unexpected success of ‘The Gratitudes’ has encouraged Anagrama to publish it, we should thank all those TikTok influencers who championed it. 7.5.
