Una palabra tuya

Rosario and Milagros are street sweepers and have known each other since childhood. Vulnerable in appearance as she is firm in her contradictions, Rosario recounts the years gone by beside that force of nature which is Milagros (Miracles); years of mishaps, hopes, fear and realities, which have shaped the apprehension of an undeserving happiness. Awarded with the Biblioteca Breve Prize 2005, “One Word of Yours” is the portrait of two women—extraordinary contribution to contemporary Spanish narrative—, of two projections of the one same distorted mirror of two vital trajectories: one from the most cruel of nothingness of an unhappy life, the other towards an expectant future from a redeemed life; and in the middle, piety and forgiveness. Elvira Lindo commands an admirable sense of form, an insight into speech and the precise reality that life reflects, with a narrative complexity made easy. Visceral, captivating, written in a state of trance that slides intact in its reading, the novel possesses a breathtaking emotional depth. It is a tall and deep novel, but also full of irony, of sarcasm, of harshness that suddenly transforms itself into tenderness. The common lives that Elvira Lindo portrays take on the dimension of moral crossroads and acquire the greatness, dignity and noble human profoundness of an ancient tragedy in a contemporary setting.