Diamant blau

Author: Care Santos
- Fiction
- Labutxaca/Grupo 62
- ISBN: 9788416600670
- Release Date: 10-28-2015
-Reviewed by: Alejandro Varderi

A Catalan family saga from the early XVIII Century to the 1920’s.

The novel deals with the changes in a provincial Catalan society, as seen through the lives of characters constrained by social conventions. Mainly, strong and independent women who will defy the masculine centered world in which they live, mirroring the works of other Catalan writers such as Mercè Rodoreda, Montserrat Roig and Nuria Amat, and of Latin American authors Isabel Allende, Ángeles Mastretta and Laura Esquivel, among others.

The industrial city of Mataró, 20 miles from Barcelona, is at the core of the saga in which the reader witnesses the rise and fall of the Pujolà family, from owners of a small dry cleaning firm to being important industrialists in the business. A family, finally bankrupt by the economic downturns and the financial panic of the 1920’s.

In Diamant Blau, political actions, crucial in the understanding of events leading to the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship, are combined with the desire to change the fate of their sex that the heroines undertake, in their quest for breaking away from a repressive society. Nevertheless, the predictability of their behavior deprives the reader of the magical or the unexpected devised in the works of the above writers.

An interesting subplot, nonetheless, is articulated in the fascination of the male characters with cinema. In this sense, the author also reviews the beginning of the art and the importance of the medium in Catalan society to the point that “in the first decade of the XX Century, Barcelona was one of the cities with more cinemas in the world, equal to Berlin and only surpassed by Paris and New York.” (109)

 

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