Bruno Blog

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.

Longing is an emotion, a feeling, which I’m sure we’ve all felt sometime. In my case it mixes with the nostalgia of the things I no longer have, and especially of past times, where my memories are of feeling good, of complete happiness. I miss the summers with my grandparents, who are no longer here, the meals with family when everyone showed up and the table was filled with food mixed with hope. The Friday dinners, and the weekends, with my siblings and my parents when we ate the pizza slices from a little shop at Roger de Flor Street, and it was our weekly feast, while we watched the show Un, Dos, Tres together.

All these nostalgic memories, and many more which I could talk about until you got bored, but if I continue, I might get emotional; they have been awoken after reading a novel like EL TIEMPO DE LA LUZ, by Silvia Tarragó, published by Umbriel in Spanish and by Columna in Catalán.

Silvia Tarragó, the author, is able to transport us to 1940, the inauguration of the first subterranean galleries in Europe, the luxurious Avenida de la Luz, in the Barcelona of the postwar. Julia is the main character and she will be witness to the evolution of the gallery and the different traders that make it up. Rosita, the daughter of the bakers, who lived her first love with the attendant at the cinema inside the galleries.  A strange lady who will open a typewriter store (remember the Olivettis?), a perfume seller who’s involved with men in the regime, and a railway worker who’s a poet. We’ll see how these characters’ stories grow and intertwine; building an underworld filled with passion and hatred, but that keeps changing, decade after decade, feeling the exciting beat of Barcelona of the postwar, until the end of the eighties. A coral novel, where Barcelona is the background curtain again, but in which human relationships and love, are the main core to explain a period of new beginnings, and the spirit of the traders after a tough war. Another novel for all those who like to taste their memories and share them, which you can read quickly and leaves you wanting more.