1. The most striking narrative ellipsis in cinema appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a moment that condenses four million years into mere seconds: a band of hominids on the African plains raise the tibia of a mighty beast, and in the next instant the bone becomes a spacecraft racing toward the Moon in 1999.
2. A comparable monumental ellipsis could belong to the recent history of the country: a person in a village lifts the head of a decapitated chicken, and moments later it dissolves into a handful of pumpkin seeds resting in the granddaughter’s palm, while she works as a community manager in a minimalist design studio filled with monstera plants and pallets in a large city.
3. The line spoken in the book describes a moment of memory without mist: I only wanted your father to work while sitting, uttered to the granddaughter who has just published a very special, precise, and beautiful volume about pumpkin seeds. The grandfather, it is noted, lost his right index finger in his first job in a suburb near Santander after arriving from the countryside. The protagonist describes a generation now in their forties who once ate pumpkin seeds, averaging about 5,000 per week, 20,000 per month, 240,000 per year. Yes: seated on a park bench, stirring a pot to keep it from burning, munching pumpkin seeds as if conducting an orchestra, a squad of hungry dragons wondering what marvels and other monsters lie beyond the known land.
2. That generation helped usher in democracy, the internet, and Erasmus. They also carried a stubborn boredom that grows from ease and comfort. It was the mix of desire, boredom, and imagination that shaped who they became. They were told to imagine a future, to not imitate their elders, and to remember how those elders lived.
3. The narrator, with grandparents similar to the ones described, has long held a fascination for upwardly mobile figures. From eighteenth‑century French novels to later writers who move through left-leaning circles of the bourgeoisie wearing clothes that look both sloppy and stylish, the idea of a poor person dressed as a rich person, or a rich person pretending to be poor, remains a powerful motif.
Also explored are those who drifted across class lines in the sixties and even now—between flirtation and guilt—attending concerts, civic centers, and political gatherings, appearing as ordinary as anyone until one night you are invited into their home and you see what the house reveals.
There are books that map the map of the stylish crowd or the precariousness of creative work. Yet Pipas illuminates another thread, offering a different focal point for understanding these dynamics.
If anything catches the eye today, it is this new way of signaling what one is not: on Twitter many people who clearly possess substantial patrimony play at being poor, and on Instagram they appeared rich only moments earlier, a reversal of values that speaks to status performance in the digital age.
No one is more heartbreaking than someone unaware of their privileges, and no one should forget the chain of privilege that sustains comfort while others strive to secure what they never had. It is a careful reminder that privilege exists even when it is not openly acknowledged.
That is the effect of the book: it avoids cheap epics and melodrama, offering a precise blend of essay and fiction, memory and imagination, while examining family history and concerns about housing policy.
Looking at where people come from, the fridges in households, and the bags of pumpkin seeds, one recalls the first generation that refused to dwell in regret too late: the longing to say, I regret not having tried, perhaps best expressed in the small ritual of sharing pumpkin seeds together.