A ten-year-old boy, Unai, is watching a time trial of the cycling tour, impatient to know if Marino Lejarreta has been the fastest to climb to the top of Naranco. Just when his parents announce that they are going to move house, the announcer confirms that his idol has won the stage. Unai excitedly hugs his parents; They believe he is excited about the move. NOVEL ‘Life and work’ Author Galder Reguera Publisher Seix Barral Year 2024 Pages 384 Price 20.90 euros 5Thirty years later, Unai remembers that happy moment, the last time, although for the wrong reasons, the three of them hugged each other—the four of them, because his sister was about to be born—“like a family that loves each other.” For that boy, his world was perfect: friends from the neighborhood, a childhood first love and his grandparents, the ‘aitites’, whom he adored. But that happy world soon collapses: as soon as the baby is born, his father, a writer with only one book published with few sales, blames his lack of success on the burden of his family and living in Bilbao, “so far away.” from where things happen”, he left home looking for the success he thought he deserved. Since he abandoned them, Unai has not maintained a relationship with his father and now, so many years later, he finds out that he is about to die. That, together with the sale of his ‘mother’s’ house, where he spent part of his childhood, makes him return to Bilbao to meet his ‘mother’ and say goodbye to a part of his past. Narrated in a powerful first person , with very well-constructed characters and many details that anchor the story to reality. The book is a long monologue from Unai to his father where the story of the trip is intertwined with memories, without moral judgments, with more questions than reproaches and without letting himself be overcome by resentment towards the man who abandoned him. Galder Reguera (Bilbao, 1975) weaves a beautiful family novel written with elegant prose that flows and envelops the reader; It is a delight to read it, to find the small, beautiful stories that are interspersed as interludes, such as the morning when the ‘amama’ prepares fish soup, their visits together to the market, the special relationship with her ‘aitite’… Narrated In a powerful first person, with very well-constructed characters and with many details that anchor the story to reality, the novel reveals truth: that family could be ours. Above the entire narrative is the conflict of Unai, who doubts whether to find himself. with his father for the last time: on the one hand, the rejection of a man who always considered him a hindrance; on the other, that atavistic instinct that unites us to blood and a certain feeling of debt: Unai is also a writer and came closer to literature thanks to the books that his father left at home, which he began to read to feel close to him. . Also present throughout the text is a reflection on literature and the act of creating. His father understood literature as a barrier that isolated him from life, while for Unai it is a link that unites him to others. For his father, the work is above life and in this conversation Unai shows him that the work has no meaning if there is not a full life behind it.
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