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Inés Y La Alegría (2010)

by Almudena Grandes(Favorite Author)

4.07 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

8483832534 (ISBN13: 9788483832530)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

TusQuets

series

Episodios de una guerra interminable

review 1: Este libro supuso una especie de desilusión para mi. Reconozco que sigo con verdadero interés la carrera de Almudena Grandes. Si tuviera que hablar de "autores favoritos", posiblemente Almudena Grandes figuraría en la lista pero este libro me gustó menos que anteriores obras de la escritora. Reconozco que hubo momentos en los que me emocionó hasta las lágrimas, lo cual supone siempre uno (o varios) puntos positivos que agregar a cualquier obra pero en el caso de Inés y la alegría hubo momentos que me resultaron aburridísimos. Fui incapaz de leer la crónica histórica sobre la Pasionaria. Me parecía que rompía "la diversión". Los personajes se te hacen cercanos, los vas conociendo u odiando y disfrutando de sus vivencias y de repente ¡ZAS!, la Pasionaria y su ... morevida presentada de una forma distante, como una crónica histórica desapasionada puesto que pretende presentar unos hechos y no acercar a un personaje histórico al espectador para que conozca a la persona que encarna al personaje histórico.Se notaba que ALmudena Grandes había hecho un arduo trabajo de investigación sobre la Pasionaria y pretendía reflejarlo en su obra y en mi opinión, está introducido de una forma un tanto forzada y si n venir demasiado a cuento.
review 2: Ambitious and (very) flawed. I started this in Spanish but it was too difficult for me, so I switched to the French edition. Even then it was a slog (1000 pages!). I have really enjoyed the other Almudena Grandes novels I've read, so this massive tome was a disappointment.It certainly was a challenge to write too. In the French edition there's a foreword where she explains that because the invasion of the Val d'Aran by Spanish republicans in October 1944 is so little known (even in Spain), she has interspersed historical sections describing the political context and the personalities involved. Problem: the novel starts with one of these, a lengthy disquisition on the internal politics of the Spanish Communist Party, which would be enough to put most people off. I made it though, and things improved once I got to the first fictional part.But only for a while. Grandes has always been a fan of time-shifting, jumping backwards and forwards, but here she goes completely overboard. She jumps decades within a few paragraphs and without warning, leaving you struggling to figure out how this episode fits into the story. Characters do things or refer to things that are not explained until hundreds of pages later. I certainly couldn't describe the sequence of events here with any certainty. By the time she was well into the post-war years, set in Toulouse, I had lost interest.The only part that really worked for me was the part about the actual invasion, when the heroine Inés is working as a cook at the guerrillas' headquarters in Bosost. This is classic Grandes, vivid and powerfully written. I particularly liked the long sections in which Inés retreats into the kitchen and calms herself by cooking; the writing is beautifully evocative. If the novel had ended with the flight to France, it would have been far better. less

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