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La vida cuando era nuestra
Lola lives a life filled with books and café conversations, languid siestas and projects for constructing a better Spain, but in 1936 the day comes when life is pure resistance. Now, fifteen years later, all that is left of that life is a small, old-style bookstore, hidden away in a Madrid neighbourhood, to which Lola and her husband Matías go every morning to sell romantic novelas, splendid classics and crayons. In this modest establishment, one afternoon in 1951, Lola meets Alice, a woman who has found aherreason to live in books. Together, they begin to read a book that takes the reader back in time to England, at the beginning of the 20th century, to meet a child who grew up wondering who her parents were.
´Life When it was Ours´ is a clever intertwining of narratives and stories that brings together unexpected associations and characters to portray some new and original perspectives on the Europe of the first part of the twentieth century.
The three main characters are three very different women who all have their own stories, which are revealed piece by piece with enticing snippets dropped by the author. The plot begins with an intriguing character who follows a man in the street, immediately pulling the reader in to a web of suggestion and curiosity. But this impelling narrative is only the lead-in to another story, to bring two of the main characters together. Each of the three principal characters in the book has suffered, and is suffering, from events beyond her control that have left her a victim of circumstance and society. Yet the characters are built strongly enough that they are not seen as victims or helpless, so the reader can admire and become fond of all of them.
… The story of each woman is divulged slowly and teasingly, insinuating parallels between them and guiding the reader to imagine and deduce more intimate aspects of each woman than is ever actually clarified. The book’s feel of mysterious histories and interesting characters takes hold right from the very beginning, making it a true page-turner.
Marian Izaguirre’s style accomplishes the art of suggestion and offering just enough
information to get the reader’s curiosity piqued without giving anything away, so that while the reader can guess that something is coming, when it happens it is often still unexpected…
…it seems that the book would be equally fascinating to a British (or European) audience as to the Spanish one, and as both a good read and a social commentary it has many qualities to appeal to both…
In summary, most of the appeal of Life When it was Ours is the captivating story and intelligent writing that would be successful in any society, but in particular a translation for the British market would introduce some new elements of European history that are unexplored by most British readers…
From the reader´s report by Suky Taylor