Open Heart - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Elvira Lindo was born in Cádiz, Spain. Before becoming a fiction writer, she was a presenter, actress, and scriptwriter for television and radio. Lindo received the Atlántida Prize from the Editors Union of Catalonia and the Biblioteca Breve Prize for her novel Una palabra tuya . In addition to authoring numerous other successful books, including the international bestselling Manolito Gafotas series, Lindo is a frequent contributor to the Spanish daily newspaper El País . Adrian Nathan West is a writer and literary critic based in Spain. He has translated more than twenty books, among them Rainald Goetz’s Insane and Sibylle Lacan’s A Father: Puzzle . Klappentext "Following the rise and fall of a great love, this intimate family novel is also a moving tribute to the generation that struggled to survive in Spain after the Civil War. In Open Heart, Elvira Lindo tells the story of her parents, which is the story of an excessive love, a passionate and unstable love story forged through constant anger and reconciliation, with an entire family's mood dependent on it. Her father's outsized personality, his caprices, his decisions mark the rhythms of a life characterized by drifting: after the wedding, Manuel's job in the Dredging and Construction Company obliges him to change cities time after time, preventing him, his wife, and their children from settling down roots. Places pass by while their love disintegrates and their children grow up in a family history marked by her father's character and the tragic illness and early death of her mother"-- Leseprobe My sister and I sitting in front of them: my father and his roommate. Manolo and Clemente. The two of them sitting stiff in the pleather hospital chairs with the little attached tray like a school desk, waiting for dinner. The image, too, has an air of school days about it, despite the two men’s old age and the oxygen tanks they’re breathing through. My father’s hair is carefully combed—I’ve never seen him like this before except in photos from his youth, sent to my mother with romantic devotion. A nurse has taken a liking to him, even if he misbehaves, and she combs him and sprinkles cologne on his scalp every morning. His now quite sparse curls are flattened down with pomade on the back of his neck and they look like tiny snails. Somehow they add weight to his already stern features, which have the frightened look of a terrified animal. And he is terrified. He knows death is lurking around the corner, and there’s nothing he can do to avoid it. When they let him out, he’ll go back to smoking and drinking, and one of these days, he’ll stop being able to breathe and he’ll die. He’s more anxious about dying alone than dying as such; that’s why he’s latched on to his roommate, Clemente, and the two of them have developed a strange camaraderie.   Clemente is cheerful, fat, and old. He wears his hair in bangs like a rocker from the seventies, or a musketeer gone to seed. He lives in a shelter. According to him, his kitchen-supply business went under, and when—to use his words—King Midas lost his shirt, his wife and daughters abandoned him. For a while he lived with his girlfriend, whom he affectionately calls my little Polack on account of her origins, but they were evicted, and she hasn’t shown her face in the three days we’ve been visiting my father. Clemente has integrated perfectly into our family thanks to my father, who got us used to accepting acquaintances of unknown provenance, whether we liked them or not, back when we were kids. He’s always been devoted to his bar mates, to the fleeting friends you meet on a roadside bench, to waiters, pharmacists, salesmen, road workers, doormen, distant cousins, anyone you can have a glib conversation with to fill the silence. He’s never cared about origins or status, and he’s never needed his chums to be interesting. What my...

Product details

• Authors: Elvira Lindo, Adrian Nathan West
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 04.04.2023
• EAN: 9781635422528
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-252-8
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 202 mm x 27 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature