Bruno Blog

There is no doubt that social media is, nowadays, the way to communicate for teenagers, and for adults as well. Sometimes it is excessive, since we are losing face to face contact, we don’t listen, and everything is said through our phones, through the screens, without looking in the eyes, without facing the other. When written, and when the other person is not in front, everything seems easier, but it is a double-edged sword, since whatever is written, is never going to disappear. Those moments we did highly enjoy, as meeting our friends after a phone call are disappearing, since now only a WhatsApp is needed. A phone call for your birthday is no longer a requirement since a WhatsApp message does the job. It is getting harder and harder to listen to somebody’s voice, even at work, where most issues are handled via email. It is faster, of course, but human warmth is lost, proximity, and the feeling of feeling that person close to you. Words, tone, are crucial when understanding and through e-mail, they definitely cannot be equally understood. Screens are cold, making us become as cold as they are.

This is why David Lozano’s latest novel DESCONOCIDOS aims to show the good and the bad of these relationships established through social media. Lara and Wilde were meant to be perfect, their first date, after a few months chatting away, they would finally meet face to face. That same night the inspector Irene Castells investigates the murderer of a teenager whose face is completely smashed, and who carries a photograph in his jacket. David Lozano will play with the reader and the characters will take us to deep lands the reader won’t be able to leave. This book is such a page-turner, as the Americans claim, since you need to know what goes on in the following page, you need to know whether both stories are related or are, simply, parallel stories. The novel falls short, it moves fast and its clever plot twists, great for giving a panoramic perspective of what it means to always being online. It is absolutely amazing. An Edebé Award winning novel, well deserved, for a great author for a book which will delight young readers as well as those who are not so young. An entertaining novel, overall, but a novel which shows what is going on in our society in which a ‘like’ can be very harmful. Thank you, David, for creating such an amazing thriller, so voracious, a thriller which definitely teaches us many things.

Even if we don’t like it, we all depend on time. I am always lacking time. 48 hours days should exist in order to be able to do all I need to do, and everything I would like to do. I sense the passing of time with the years, one more year and it seems as if hours were even faster, or I am slower, I never know what to think. I also try to take the most out of the moments I like, the ones I would like to never end: family gatherings, weekends with my kin, the hours practicing sport, a coffee with my friends, and sunsets at the seaside.  Years go by and, without even realizing, we are past forty and thinking that it is better to have a birthday than not to have it.

However, after reading the book EL LADRÓN DE MINUTOS (The Minute’s Thief) by David Lozano, I thought it wouldn’t be at all bad that my birthday disappeared from the calendar and I could stop the time and my age, and not have to worry about this feeling that life escapes from my hands. But I am certain it would have its consequences, as it happens to Edu, the main character of the story, who is ten years old and really doesn’t like having his birthday stolen. So, he tries to take it back. In order to do that, he goes to the Shop of Forbidden Things, where he will get the Suctioning Machine of Time, capable of stealing minutes in order to regain and collect them until reaching a complete day. It seems easy and, without thinking in its consequences, he starts the hunt for good moments… of others. This way, step by step, he becomes a true addict to these minutes that conform others’ happiness, and stops living the present. He will abandon his best friend, his classmates, he will stop playing football, he will forget about his studies… and fall into an unhappy and selfish life of which he will not awake until the very last moment, when he finds himself forced to decide what to give true value in life.

A masterful incursion by Lozano into the world of the little ones in the house, with a fun story that gives value to values and, yet only because of that, is already worth not missing.