El cielo ha vuelto

Author: Clara Sánchez
- Fiction
- Booket Planeta
- ISBN: 9786070743542
- Release Date: 10-13-2013
-Reviewed by: Félix Lizárraga

“Six months ago, a woman I didn’t know told me that there was someone in my life who wished I were dead.” Thus begins El cielo ha vuelto (Heaven has returned), Clara Sánchez’s last book and 2013 Planeta Award for best novel.

By all appearances, its protagonist, Patricia, seems to lead a blessed life. She is a glamorous supermodel, married to an artist she adores, idolized by her family, and well respected by the people at her model agency. But a series of strange, apparently unconnected, apparently random occurrences start cracking those glossy surfaces, and Patricia starts realizing that things are not quite what they seem. For instance, what is going on behind the scenes at the Magistrelli model agency? Is Manuela, the exotic new girl in town, trying to take her place as the agency star model? Does his family really care about her, or about the money she so generously provides to them? Does Elías, her husband, know she is the anonymous collector who buys most of his paintings? Is someone really trying to murder her through sorcery, or is Viviana (the witch she met on a New Delhi-Madrid flight) just taking advantage of her insecurities?

The novel ends up responding most of these questions, but they are somehow less interesting than Patricia’s journey, from a successful but vapid woman who has mostly coasted her way in life through sheer luck to a mature person who can unflinchingly look at reality and take the reins of her own destiny. She is not all that likable in the first chapters, but by the end the reader cares deeply about her and even admires her.

El cielo ha vuelto works well as a (possibly) supernatural thriller because it is well grounded in reality. The novel moves easily from the rarified worlds of high-end modeling or art galleries to a modest neighborhood bar in Barcelona or a beach in Alicante, and all those places are described in rich detail and full of interesting, disparate characters. It reminds me somewhat of those Hitchcock movies where a beautiful, poised and apparently fragile blonde is thrown in the midst of impossible, sometimes violent situations, and has to fight tooth and nail for her life.

There is a certain blandness in the language that seeps into the dialogs, to the point that all characters sound pretty much the same. Even Rumanian immigrants (who, we are told, barely know Spanish) speak exactly like everybody else. That, and little details here and there that defy verisimilitude, like the eternal flame that burns in the maid’s room, even when there is no one home –fire hazard, anyone?—are my only gripes concerning El cielo ha vuelto. While not an exceptional book by any means, it is a surprisingly good read, and chronicles the empowering journey of a woman who is trying to find an invisible enemy and finds herself in the process.

Clara Sánchez is a prolific novelist born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in Spain. Before the Planeta Award, she had received the Alfaguara in 2000 and the Nadal in 2010.

 

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