The rise and fall of a great passion, the ferocious love of two great characters who seem to be conspiring against their own serenity.
In Open Heart, Elvira Lindo tells the story of her parents, which is the story of an excessive love, a passionate and unstable love story forged through constant anger and reconciliation, with an entire family’s mood dependent on it.
Her father’s outsized personality, his caprices, his decisions mark the rhythms of a life characterized by drifting: after the wedding, Manuel’s job in the Dredging and Construction Company obliges him to change cities time after time, preventing him, his wife, and their children from settling down roots. Places pass by while their love disintegrates and their children grow up in a family history marked by her father’s character and the tragic illness and early death of her mother.
* “Elvira Lindo’s literary sensibility leads us to believe, despite the countless titles devoted to this subject since the dawn of time, that not everything has yet been said about love.” - Fernando Aramburu, ABC Cultural.
* “A portentous novel.” - Juan José Millás
* “Her masterpiece… a radical immersion in the heart of a woman who has managed to free herself not only from rancor and fear, but from the prejudices imposed by her family’s patriarchal morality.” - Manuel Rodríguez Rivero, Babelia, El País.
* “It shifts from the generational portrait of a country to the moving observations of the most intimate and at times most painful thing of all: the family.” - Ramón Rozas, Diario de Pontevedra.
* “It offers us priceless pages. Her best book.” - J. M. Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural.
* “An excellent novel that dissects the influence of the family circle and the persistent impress of the past.” - Jesús Ferrer, La Razón.
I’ve been preparing myself to write this book my entire life. This is the story of my parents, half-remembered, half-invented. The narration of the rise and fall of a great passion, the ferocious love of two great people who seem to be conspiring against their own serenity.
Elvira Lindo