It’s been a while since I’ve realised time flies. We get older, and I see how the number of divorces amongst the different groups of friends I have keeps getting bigger and bigger. It’s not good nor bad, it is simply a fact that makes me wonder whether a lifelong love story with someone is possible.

I believe there are different ways to love and there is no precise mathematical formula to know what is it that works, since I think each couple has its own way, but, reading Victor Alexander’s ELS AMANTS DE LA RAMBLA DEL CELLER  I’ve not been able to restrain myself of thinking about those old couples whom have been together their whole entire lives sharing everything. And I wonder whether LOVE, written in capitals, keeps getting bigger as a snow bubble, or whether it shifts with every step we take towards that thing we want it to be. Life as a couple is a whole world, and this novel is a solid basement to be able to face a century of life and of history greatly told by the author, knowledgeable of it, and who brings back the reader together with the rest of characters, all that happened.

Maria and Joan walk their ninety years through the Celler’s Rambla, slowly, as two lovebirds would do, observing today’s world go by, so distant from theirs, and so hostile, that it’s already falling on them without mercy, like a vulture looking for carrion. Niel, a neighbor of theirs, watches them, alerted by their kindness and vulnerability; he’s a man that, as the old lovers of the Celler’s Rambla, carries a past where pain and joy intertwine, uncontrolled, from his teenage years in Paris and an eternal unhappy love for Judit, his second wife, victim to a life full of infamy. Maria, who everyone calls Marieta, Joan has experienced a century full of war, oppression, silences, harassment…but they’ve made the time and have found strength to love their family, the theatre, opera, cinema…this life that, right when it’s reaching its end, seems to want to eliminate them before their time. ELS AMANTS DE LA RAMBLA DEL CELLER is an extraordinary story that contrasts tenderness to cruelness, and where it is shown, without any filter, the current extortions of real-estate mobbing, and it is a criticism to sexual abuses to minors.

A vignette postcard that I, personally, like, and that makes me get goosebumps by wondering if we can actually feed love and make it grow as a limitless snow bubble, but which has to, every now and then, slow down in order to keep growing.