There are recurring themes in the novel because they are part of the core of its construction as a literary genre. One of the most important are actions in the past that have conditioned the lives of some characters and currently appear as a narrative trigger for their survival.
This is what happens in Las largas sombras (2009; Roca Editorial, 2018) by my country woman Elia Barceló. It revolves around an event from the past that conditions the lives of “28-year-old girls”, seven girls who mostly respond to a typical bourgeois social group typical of the industrial city of the seventies. All finish MÜB at Azorín Institute in Elda; All of them have a positive future ahead of them. The reader finds them more than fifty years later, with some dreams fulfilled and many not. Life.
A few weeks ago, thanks to the weekly El valle de Elda, I learned that the Disney+ production company is filming a series based on this novel with a great cast of Elena Anaya, Belén Cuesta, Marta Etura. and Irene Escolar and they said they’d be filming in Elda. And even though I haven’t read this novel, it didn’t surprise me because Elia Barceló has a clear cinematographic point of view in all the novels of the last 15 years. So I felt the need to go to the Alberto Navarro Library and prepare to have a great reading weekend with the novel in hand, yes, as I said, after being programmed in Barceló mode.
The story begins with Rita’s arrival in Elda after living in London for over thirty years and establishing herself as a film director. Encountering his young friends who respond to a diverse and functional gallery of characters will trigger what set them apart in the past to become strongly embedded in his present.
Given the fact that the action has two different scenarios that change in the novel (everything that happened in 1974 with the trip to Majorca as the end of the course and the climax on the one hand, and the present of the book on the other hand), the plot is first told by an all-knowing narrator in Chapter 3. developed through the person, always from a perspective close to the heroes, shown with a certain affection, as the right option to tell the story; secondly, through dialogues that always show how the characters want to present themselves; and finally through other materials such as e-mails, memoirs and letters. All formal resources are at the service of a successful thematic progression that results in the perfectly achieved goal of resolving the tension surrounding the entire novel.
As the author’s hallmark, his story contains more than enough elements to qualify as a historical-social document, in part because of its costumbrist portrait, as well as the structural and literary scaffolding of the intrigue and tension it presents. a generation of women experiencing puberty in the early years of transition. In it, elements such as the configuration of the feminine versus the masculine from a fifty-year diachronic perspective, the way of understanding and developing sexuality, the issue of sexist violence and, of course, the need for personal freedom form a narrative material. Although it has its own existence, it is reliably and seriously elaborated in the service of the plot: the mystery/solution. The ending is presented in Elia Barceló, as usual, in the Russian doll technique, thus leading the reader perfectly to the conclusion on the last page.
And why should you read this novel? Readers of the genre will thoroughly enjoy it, as it responds to the most orthodox conventions of the thriller genre; because it goes further with the social and cultural contribution of a whole generation who lived through the adolescence of the late seventies; and also, because life is always the result of our choices.