The penultimate dream

In a solvent literary language, this beautiful work by Ángela Becerra—awarded in Spain the prestigious Azorín Novel Prize in 2005—is a brilliant exaltation of love and feeling, beyond age, norms and the dictates of the moment.

Through a fine intercalation of temporal planes, identifiable with known events from the recent histories of Spain and Colombia, the story projects us both towards the past of the older characters and towards the vibrant current events of the younger ones, in a true saga. of loves and passions, of eroticism and spirituality, of contradictions and surprising resolutions.

When in 1939, in the best hotel in Cannes, the first meeting takes place between Joan Dolgut, a young Spanish waiter, the son of a Republican, and Soledad Urdaneta, the teenage daughter of a Colombian millionaire, falling in love is inevitable. But the distances are given and the relationship will crash against the conventions of the time. Their lives will then become an unfinished dream, until they reach the surprising outcome. And it will be their respective children who, trying to unravel the secret that marked the lives of their parents, put in motion again an emotional charge as intense as that of their parents.

Built from an experiential and literary conception that critics described as “magical idealism” since her previous novel De los amores negados , published by Villegas Editores in 2003, this second novel by Ángela Becerra is destined to be one of the great successes. of the year.