To get to this title, its author omits everything that Alicia had to do to get to that country. But Elena Medell he's right to blur everything before Wonderland. because the country, the allegory, melt into squalor and Alicia could never fit in such a place.
Previously known to me thanks to some collaboration with Maria hesse, this author now surprises with a powerful story, without restrictions. A novel with that ruthless lyricism of a young narrator convinced that narrating commits you, if not with the truth, with certainty as a backdrop. The difference between one thing and another lies in a cluster of sensations and evocations that range from melancholy to euphoria without middle ground.
What is the weight of family in our lives, and what is the weight of money in our lives? What happens when a mother decides not to take care of her daughter, and what happens when a daughter decides not to take care of her mother?
Would we have been different if we had been born in another place, in another time, in another body? In this novel there are two women: María, who at the end of the sixties left her life in a southern city to work in Madrid, and Alicia, who was born more than thirty years later and repeated her journey for different reasons. We know what separates them, but… What unites them? What belongs to them, what have they lost?
Wonders is a novel about money. A novel about the lack of money: about the way in which the money that we do not have defines us. It is also a novel about care, responsibilities and expectations; about the precariousness that does not respond to the crisis but to the class, and about who - what voices, under what circumstances - will tell the stories that allow us to know our origins and our past.
The wonders It covers the last decades of the history of Spain: from the end of the dictatorship to the feminist outbreak, told from the periphery of a big city and in the voices - and in the bodies - of those who cannot demonstrate because they have to work.
En The wonders, in its own way a learning novel, there are also shared flats, slow lines of public transport, rations in bars with plates sprinkled with oil. And again: the lack of money. That's what this dazzling novel is about, which has already seduced some of the world's leading international publishers before its publication and is in the process of being translated into German, English, Greek and Dutch.
You can now buy the novel «Las maravillas», by Elena Medel, here: