La casa vacía
When exactly did everything get twisted?At what point did your body become a hindrance, a cruel reminder of a past to which you have no choice but to return to? These, most likely, are some of the questions that Eva asks herself, the protagonist of this novel, to whom the weight of the stares, words and the desires of others becomes increasingly unbearable. In the grip of constant physical pain and a routine that seems to have no end, she has, for the last ten years, to string together odd jobs, such as door-to-door botch jobs and waitress, day after day covering the same trajectory without breaks, which go from apathy to resistance and vice versa.However, when the money finally runs out and her land-lord orders her to leave her house, Eva will also be forced to return to the only place, deep-down, that she has known, her parents’ home, that of her childhood, the one in which one night she left without looking back.Now, back in the town where she grew up, she will have to choose either living forever in the past or traveling a path different from that which others have already cho-sen for her.
In this extraordinary character study, Manuel Barea uses a complex style and voice, to narrate a simple story but no less captivating, that of a woman who fights against her own destiny and the damage inflicted by others in a succession of daily battles that paints a vivid reflection on tradition, death, religion, family and, above all, time and its capricious will to heal wounds.