Nuestros hijos volarán con el siglo

Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos is the most outstanding figure of the Spanish Enlightenment. No one imagined the possibility of an alternative destiny for Spain like he did, more fortunate and less traumatic. To this day his biography still presents serious lacunae: we harldy know anything about his love life, and the same goes for his poisining while serving as a minster, or the reasons for which he was locked-up in the Castillo de Bellever on the island of Mallorca. But where the historian is barred, the novelist ventures forth. This is exaclty what Juan Pedro Aparicio has done when peacing together the final days of the Asturian, his most intimate wishes, his yearning to reach London, when, on 1811 Gijón is besieged by Napoleon’s army, and he has to flee by sea on a small boat packed with refugees. A few-hours trip turns into an eight-day ordeal in the middle of raging storms. The story of this journey is the main axis of this novel. Fear, love, hate, courage, the idiological postures at odds, exacerbated by the hostility unleashed by nature, turns the foundering vessel into the symbol of that Spain which has conditioned to such a large extent the country’s historial development. One of literature’s great miracles is being able to condensce a couple of centuries in three hundred pages through the tragic events of a handful of lives.