Learning to Lose

May 1, 2010
Or, the callecita of crossed destinies—a moody novel of contemporary mores and amours across the water in Spain.

In recent years Spanish novelist Arturo Prez-Reverte has written several intellectual mysteries set in Spanish cities, all populated by men and women who smoke too much, drink too much, never sleep, and ponder the meaning of it all. Trueba, a screenwriter and director, imports a slightly cleaner-living crew of characters from the provinces of South America and mixes them up with native Spaniards who live slightly more healthful lives, but some of whom wind up dead all the same. One, very nearly, is young Sylvia, who, at the tender age of 16, gets mowed down by a car driven by soccer star Ariel, who could easily have gotten away with hit-and-run:"The accident would have been completely different if he weren't a celebrity. He had been drinking, he was driving fast, it would be easy for the press to vent their anger on him, for it to get him into real trouble." But Ariel, a gallant from Argentina, isn't like that, and he faces up to Sylvia in a fumbling effort to secure forgiveness. Things get complicated—and steamy, with the understanding that the age of consent in Spain is likely lower than that in, say, Schenectady. Ariel goes back to the soccer pitch, while Sylvia's world, once a place of comparative innocence, gets even more complicated, given that her father has just killed a man—"a man who had been, for several years, his best friend." Shades of Meursault! Trueba's story turns pensive and existential, but it's also documentary, a chronicle of the lives of young people who, like kids everywhere, experiment sexually, smoke a little pot, lie to parents as their parents lied to their parents before them, and lust after pop-culture heroes. At turns the novel resembles Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander trilogy, albeit absent the constant mayhem, with its young heroine adrift in a world that offers few reasons to be trustful, and plenty to be otherwise.

An elegantly written, well-thought-through coming-of-age novel, with the requisite furtive embraces, broken hearts and missed signals.

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June 15, 2010

In this new work by novelist/screenwriter Trueba, which won the 2009 Critics Award, much of the background is supplied by the twilight world of Spain's illegal aliens and the international politics of soccer. Ariel, a soccer player from Argentina who watches movies with subtitles and even visits the Prado Museum in his adopted city of Madrid, hits Sylvia with his car on her 16th birthday, injuring her leg. Even as the two become an item, Sylvia watches the lives of her father, Lorenzo, and grandfather Leandro unravel. Her father, abandoned by Sylvia's mother and worn out and overwhelmed, has had his field of action so reduced that the only woman he can find to replace his wife is someone he meets by chance in the stairwell of his tenement. Grandfather Leandro is a weakling sustained by the goodness of his wife, Aurora. But now that Aurora is dying, Leandro consorts with the prostitute Osembe and brings about his financial ruin. VERDICT A sparkling intellectual tapestry of youthful exuberance and decrepit old age, kindness and stupidity, and extravagant and abandoned dreams. Recommended.--Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland, MD

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