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May 16, 2016
Adulthood is attained almost by accident in Trueba’s lively and amusing novel. For Beto, a 30-year-old Spanish landscape architect preparing to present his plan for a park containing “a forest of human-sized hourglasses” at the international Lebensgärten Conference in Munich, the lunge forward is initiated by a text message from his girlfriend Marta—even though it’s not meant for him. Marta is planning to leave Beto for an ex-lover; shaken by this revelation of her infidelity, Beto takes his anger out on a more successful colleague, fellow Spaniard Alex Ripollés. But Ripollés’s role as Beto’s professional nemesis isn’t as definite as Beto thinks. Likewise, Helga, the kind, older conference volunteer, may mean more to Beto than just a place to spend the night after he strands himself in Germany rather than returning to the apartment he shares with Marta in Madrid. Trueba’s (Learning to Lose) gentle satire of youthful aimlessness is set against the background of the financial crisis, and his bumbling, self-pitying, but ultimately sympathetic Beto proves a talented guide through a largely predictable world of disappointments, reversals, and occasional joys. Readers will be gratified, but not surprised, to learn via an esteemed architect Beto admires that life is like a garden: “Beauty comes down to appreciation... the passage of time is the perfect expression of transience, and it’s precisely this fleeting quality that endows each vital stage with significance.”

October 1, 2016

At a January landscape architecture conference in Munich, Beto Sanz is shocked when Marta, his business and sexual partner, breaks off their relationship to reunite with her former lover, an Uruguayan singer. On the rebound, Beto engages in a two-night stand with Helga, a volunteer and translator more than twice his age. Once that's over, Beto returns to Barcelona to try to get his life back in order, but in December he travels to Mallorca to resume his short-lived affair with Helga, who is staying at a villa on a cove there. Trueba, a Spanish film director, journalist, actor, and screenwriter, gives his work the feel of a screenplay, with place, actions, and conversation setting the mood more than do inner thoughts. With brilliant touches of witty humor, Trueba develops the theme of time with the narrative's month-by-month calendar structure, Beto's design of an hourglass garden, and the glaring age difference between the two lovers. He also questions the possibility of rekindling a love affair, the continuation of which hangs ambiguously at novel's end. VERDICT Though the translation takes some minor liberties with the text, Trueba's second novel in English (after Learning To Lose) is a delightfully rendered, bittersweet representation of a May-December romance.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

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