“Next to me in the bed his empty space, which leaves me nowhere to cling to today.” The protagonist of the novel is Willa, an Australian lady and her life, apparently peaceful butwhich is actually a constant revolution of feelings, joys and sorrows. Thanks to a trick by the writer that we do not want to anticipate, we come into contact with Willa at different stages of her life: first an 8-year-old girl, then a...
“Hardly anyone can answer the question: Why did he fall in love with her? What did he see?” The narrator of the book is a woman called Maria Dolz. For years she has observed with discretion and confidentiality a couple having breakfast in her own bar and has painted an ideal and comfortable image of it. One day her husband disappears, brutally stabbed by a delusional homeless man, the news is in all the newspapers....
“You mean then (…) that the whole world is a metaphor for something?” A jewel to keep well exposed in the library. A simple and linear story, strong with an upsetting poetic charge. In a small and poor Chilean island, the young protagonist, Mario Jimenez, is in that phase of life in which he is not yet clear what he will do as an adult, what is certain is that he does not want to...
“My alarm clock is my age.” said the old man. “Why do old people wake up so early? It will be because the day lasts longer?” Immense. We can’t find other adjectives to describe such a masterpiece. The stylistic code is immense, the concrete weight of some reasoning and indirect reflections to which the reader is led. We do not discover anything new, many others have written it before us, but falling in love with...
“The only mother I have never lost is the one of my fears.” The story is that of the Arminuta, or “the return”. The protagonist does not have a proper name; she is just the Arminuta, and she is for everyone. Where does this girl have to go back? A young girl, at the age of thirteen, must return to her real family, mother, father and brothers. And this is how our protagonist is not...
“He paused and smiled with a kind of velvety sweetness, more effective than any threatening aggression.” S.S. Van Dine is one of the founding fathers of the modern detective story genre. A pillar that represents a mandatory reading for those who want to approach the world of yellow. The main protagonist of his novels is Philo Vance, a character from New York high society, without a clear job but with an important financial availability, who...
“Life is full of consolation prizes.” Brilliant, fast, full of ideas and reflections. Dr. Galvan’s long night is by extension the life of each of us, but not exactly at night, but during the day. Forced into a well-defined role and ready to wear expressionless masks to create something that then turns out to be empty, we lose sight of the most important things. The nothing created in the book is contained in the superfluous...
“When a deep desire has been fulfilled, the woman is willing to forgive. If not, she will never forgive.” An intense novel, dedicated to the exploration of the female soul, without any kind of cliché or, even worse, a search for easy consensus. Delicate but hard at the same time, difficult to digest in some passages and yet equally light. The book represents a milestone in the path of self-awareness and acceptance, especially in those...
“But what’s the point of being right, when you are faced with the blank, unperturbed gaze of satisfied ignorance?” A divisive book, defined as both a masterpiece and an impossible brick to absorb. Before saying what we think, we specify that it is a book that must be understood, that is, contextualized on the one hand within the historical period told by the author, on the other within the period in which it was printed...
“Sad houses, even without a particular reason, end up making those who live there sad.” An intense book with good feelings. An invitation to behave well and do good in order to live a life to the best of one’s ability, because even when we have winter inside us, a rainbow is always ready to reveal itself on the horizon. The protagonist, Eiko, is a hypersensitive girl, who grew up in a Japanese seaside, where...
