Cuatro muertes para Lidia

Author: Enrique Páez
- Fiction
- Editorial Bruño
- ISBN: 9788421672730
- Release Date: 03-15-2012
-Reviewed by: Maria del Carmen Rivero

The short novel or novella by Enrique Paez (Madrid, 1955) is a dystopia of hyperbolic proportions.  The author has its protagonist, Lidia, a young girl of 15 years old, who  has to leave all behind to find her mother who has left in a hurry.  Her hometown is also up in flames. 

The reader never finds out why she left her family, but the reader is given an apocalyptic   vision as how this closed knit family tries against all odds to find her.  Poor Lidia and poor reader who have to deal with a end of the world scenario of burning villages, rats, squalor, famine and constant death. Lidia also witnesses the death of Hector, her first boyfriend and later her father.  As this is were not enough, she is also going through adolescence! 

Lidia with the help of her father and brother, Carlos, who is mentally deficient, escape from their hometown of Cerro Bermejo to reunite with the mom somewhere South and she never returned from Punta Lanza.   It seems the author wants to convey the agony of adolescence along with a deep sense of lost. However, while his command of the language and his characters ring true to real adolescents, the overall plot is too overwhelming, and the reader is exhausted to be really concerned about the outcome in this  long  book of only 124 pages. 

Interwoven within the overall dystopia of the novella, there are hints of family life . They are the best part of the author's writing, as when they find a dog, Ringo, in the midst of an inferno (literally) who saves them from the wolves (literally, too).  The dog had made the situation bearable and familiar like for the reader, but he dog soon dies and the reader is left once more with one more senseless lost without any chance to deal with it because you are then forced to deal with another lost and then another and another one until it becomes routine.  The father also has compassion for an abandon leprosy sanitarium and how tries to help them amidst his own predicament; he soon succumbs too to septicemia from an infection. His children are left to deal with his burial in less than aseptic conditions. 

The author has a great command of language and character development especially Lidia's internal life.  Her bond to her brother Carlos and how she interprets her brother's mental deficiency and  how she  interprets this as a blessings sometime, and how she learned to deal with the death of her twin brother years before. The father's desire to keep them safe  against all odds , their dreams of seeing  their mother, are well constructed,  but the end of the world scenario, and its all its absurdities  are  a  bit overwhelming for the reader. On the brighter side, they do eventually reunite with their mother who has always been waiting for them “en el Sur” where she had left. 

The novel also has a universal theme that is approachable in other languages; the development of a dystopia similar to Margaret Atwood's books, adolescence and family life even if in a distorted way and the protagonist internal life, amidst so much chaos, are some positive aspects of the novel.   The author has written various other young adult novels and won Premio Lazarillo in 1991.-

He teaches creative writing workshops in Madrid and New York.

?

 

Buy here

Sign up to our newsletter: