Elia Barceló

I initially picked this up because of the opening pages, which I immediately suspected were a homage to the beginning of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."). And Du Maurier's novel is, I think, ultimately a helpful point of comparison. The novel does not (fortunately) attempt to imitate Rebecca, but the way it builds its narrative effect is similar: through the gradual revealing of secrets from the past, the enormous power of one person to affect show more lives in the present even from the grave, the sense of inevitability of events driven by nearly irresistable passions.

In brief (although I don't want to give away too much of the plot): The scholar Ariel Lenormand travels to Paris to research the biography of Raúl de la Torre, a by all accounts brilliant writer who published two novels in the 1970s which made him famous overnight; a decade later, after the mysterious death of his second wife in an automobile accident, he fell madly in love with a young man and publicly declared his homosexuality, but this affair was cut short by the young man’s death from AIDS and Raúl committed suicide shortly thereafter. These basic facts are clear. But Ariel is confronted by dark spaces in Raúl’s biography which he hopes to resolve with the help of the two people who knew Raúl best: his first wife Amelia and his publisher André. Amelia turns out to be cagey and resistant to the intrusion into her past, André is haunted in his own way by Raúl’s memory, and Ariel soon begins making discoveries which suggest that Raúl may have had major secrets that even those closest to him were unaware of.

In other words, this is a literary thriller of the sort that has become popular in recent years. The underlying premise is essentially the same as, for example, A.S. Byatt's Possession. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of Possession--again, not in a derivative sense, but rather because it has the same sense of the investigation taking on a life of its own and capturing all those involved within its spell, and of completely unexpection passions being unleashed.

Unlike Possession, which mostly stays in the narrative “present” as the protagonist unravels the past, so that the reader’s knowledge is limited to what the protagonist knows, this novel jumps back and forth between past and present, between Ariel’s investigations and Amelia’s memories. At first I doubted the effectiveness of this narrative choice, but in the course of the novel the reasons for the choice became clear: we, the readers, are gradually able to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle, but the characters cannot; to the very end, each of them only has a partial view of events: what really happened on the day Raúl’s second wife died, why he married her in the first place when it was clear he never loved her, and why he never wrote more than two novels. Raúl’s shadow lies heavy over all the characters, and their memories are often painful. As we gradually come to understand the scars they bear and the misunderstandings that have shaped their lives, we also understand their reasons for choosing to remain silent.

Although the suspense of the story depends on the plot (or rather, our process of piecing it together), it is the characters and the psychological drama that ultimately make the novel successful. It’s not perfect--a few of the discoveries are a bit too coincidental to be plausible--but nonetheless an effective portrayal of a group of people whose lives have all been permanently marked by one man (he left his brand on them, like horses, to mark his ownership, one of the characters muses at one point). And it is a reminder of how we all create our own stories of the past, stories that are incomplete and distorted by our wishes and fears, and what happens when these stories are called into question.

(Read in a German translation by Stefanie Gerhold.) show less

Una thriller juvenil bastante entretenido, me ha sorprendido gratamente este libro, es verdad que es como thriller es muy ligero, pero eso es normal sabiendo que además es de corte juvenil.

EL thriller está muy bien planteado, con un argumento interesante y si muy intrigante, lo cierto es que es bastante predecible, pero eso no le quita mérito, entretiene mucho y sus personajes son realmente fabulosos, todos ellos son personajes con tanta profundidad que es muy fácil imaginarlos, ponerles show more cara y cercanos, los tres adolescentes amigos son realmente geniales, me han caído muy bien, Karl es con el que más me he identificado, creo que porque es el inteligentillo que al final termina resolviendo el misterio, el antagonista, un pintor muy reconocido pero también con una personalidad muy peculiar, pude imaginarme perfecto a este personaje excéntrico y a sus horribles pinturas.

Como lector supe casi desde el principio quien era el asesino, sin embargo, he disfrutado tremendamente todo el proceso de investigación y deducción, la relación que tienen Karl, Martina e Ian es tan fresca, natural y real que me ha hecho recordar la complicidad que tenía con mis amigos a esa edad.

La narrativa de Elia Barceló es genial, me encanta como escribe esta mujer, tiene un estilo fresco, ligero y pulcro, además de darle a su historia el toque perfecto para el público al que va dirigido, la historia con un ritmo perfecto para lograr el ambiente y no querer soltarlo.

Un libro bastante entretenido de leer y que por supuesto dejo recomendado. show less

Me ha encantado este libro. Mira, no le pongo un cinco porque como suele pasar en estas antologías de relatos es difícil que te gusten todos pero las cuatro estrellas serían un 8'5 y eso es una nota muy alta.
La mayoría de relatos me han fascinado, y es difícil quedarme con uno así que diré algunos.

Desde mi ventana, porque me tuvo en tensión todo el capítulo, sabiendo que algo iba a pasar y al final no fue lo que esperaba.
La decisión de una dama, maravilloso, triste y durisimo.
La show more quinta ley, por esa nostalgia que desprende el protagonista, por ese amor a Asimov y porque me encanta cómo lo termina la autora.
Cobarde, un relato post apocalíptico que está muy bien planteado.
Y un cierre de oro que es La maga. Hipnótico e inquietante. Me encanta cómo la autora te va introduciendo en la casa a través de las cartas a Flip.
En resumen, recomendadisimo. Además esta edición tiene comentarios de la autora al final de cada relato y ayuda a situarlos en un contexto. show less

He de admitir el oficio de Elia Barceló, sabe llenar sus historias de detalles que te llevan a ir disfrutando la lectura. Sin embargo, mientras leía, no podía evitar sentir la historia un poco snob y un poco recargada de secretos, es decir, eran demasiadas cosas que al final ya me iba aburriendo. Franco, la guerra, los espías, la hermana infiel, el marido infiel, el robo de niños, el reencuentro con la hermana. No sé, lo sentí como una telenovela, un culebrón, como dicen en España.