Title: closed rooms
Author: Santos Care
Editorial: Metro
Year: 2011
Pages: 480
ISBN: 9788408098768
closed rooms, the latest novel by Care Santos, was published on Tuesday March 8, but got my hands on Monday 21 February, thanks to the kindness of the editorial Planeta, which not only sent me the galleys of the book home, but I also invited the submission of novel that took place in Madrid on Wednesday 23 February.
So far he had not read anything about this author, which was only known to have coincided with her in the presentation war scenarios, Andrea Jeftanovic . But that has not been any impediment to this novel has seduced me, fascinated, excited and delighted from the first to the last page.
Throughout its 480 pages, at least those are the ones with the proofs, if you know when you publish the novel will be the same or not, Rooms closed tells the story of the Lax family, from its heyday between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to decline with the outbreak of the Civil War. This family of the Barcelona bourgeoisie, which owns numerous textile mills, is headed by Rodolfo Lax and his wife, Maria del Roser Golorons.
Rodolfo is a businessman who, despite their high social and economic position, he feels close to his employees, whom he knew personally and who looks as if they were their children. It's a rich and busy bourgeois but at the same time, a man madly in love and dependent family his wife and their children Amadeo, John and Violet. For its part, the matriarch of the family is a modern woman, liberal, ahead of its time does not hesitate to exercise lady of the house and defending ideas so bad views at the time as equality between men and women, the right the women's suffrage or freedom of worship, although this has to organize each Wednesday at his home a few controversial spiritualist meetings.
little daughter Violet is the most fragile, most vulnerable and most passing unnoticed. It is impossible for them to his older brothers shadow. And so does John, an intelligent child who continually a victim of abuse, insults, fights and injustices committed against him her brother. For Amadeo Lax is a child, and later an adult peculiar, with a character that even he fails to understand, someone who has difficulty relating, love, feel and, above all, forgiving.
Amadeo Lax is the real protagonist of this novel that, despite everything, the intersecting characters and plots become extremely important. Amadeo is a person tormented by his own hatred, their anger, their violence, their inability to be happy and make people happy around him. Someone capable of anything. The best, especially when painting his paintings, but also the worst.
And all that will suffer in their own flesh his mother, Maria del Roser, but especially his wife, Teresa Brus, a young shy, selfless, quiet and Amadeo love since she was a girl you can find at her mother all the support, complicity, love and companionship that her husband has been unable or unwilling to give.
But they will not be the only ones who suffer the coldness, harshness and indifference of Amadeo. Because the same thing will happen to his son, Modesto. Maybe that's why it also find it hard to relate to his ex-wife, with their very young girlfriends and, above all, with Violet, his daughter.
is precisely through Violet, and a mysterious narrator who is revealed at the end of the novel, as we know the history, past, secrets, lies and hiding the family ghosts Lax in all those rooms closed.
Throughout the pages, we meet the family of the bourgeoisie in Barcelona not only for the chapters that develop in the past but, above all, for those developed in the present. However, these jumps between past and present are not such, are not uncomfortable or difficult. The story flows without our account and we are a member of the Lax family no matter if we are in 2010 or at the crossroads between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Much of the blame for this flow and this rhythm that hooks the reader and not let go are the hooks that are scattered throughout the novel. In the last chapters are chronicles of the press at the time that tell us important events for both the family and the city of Barcelona, \u200b\u200bsuch as weddings, funerals or firing of the department stores El Siglo. At the same time, chapters this tells Violet that are e-mails she exchanged with Valerie, her mother, with Daniel, her husband, in Modesto, his father, or Drina, his assistant.
But the press of the time and the emails are not the only hooks. Throughout the novel, we know the history of this family also through the pictures painted by Amadeo Lax. These hooks, these pieces of the puzzle, the threads that bind past and present but we realize it is one of the things I liked about the novel. To go slowly rebuilding the history of the Lax-Golorons from this, from the past, fitting all the pieces go.
Another thing that I loved the atmosphere, we really Care Santos moved to Barcelona at the time, the Art Nouveau and the Eixample, that of the palaces, mansions, the arrival of electricity, telephone and the first automobiles. Barcelona during the Tragic Week. A Barcelona full of changes that the Lax family members can not escape.
But, although it is the principal, Barcelona is not the only scene of the novel, which also makes us travel to the United States, France or Italy. Closed rooms is a novel multi- characters, settings, plots and, above all, lives and stories intertwined. It is a historical novel in which fictional characters intermingle and real. But it is also a crime novel with a murder and an investigation included, and a social novel that perfectly captures the Barcelona of the time. But, above all, a family novel, in which from the present accompany Violet to reveal the secrets, history and the past of his family and with it we are slowly opening the doors and discovering what lies within all those closed rooms .
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