AUTHOR: Luis Landero
PUBLISHER: Tusquets Editores
GENRE: Literary Fiction
READER’S NAME: Nicole Bell
 

At its most basic, Lluvia fina (something like “light rain” or “drizzle” in English) takes place in the present and exposes a Spanish family’s secrets and animosities toward each other. All the pettiness and resentment between the three siblings and the mother is aired out when the youngest child, Gabriel, decides to organize an eightieth birthday party for his mother. Stuck in the middle of this tangled web of relationships is the protagonist, Aurora, the wife of Gabriel. She has a true talent for listening to others’ miseries and complaints, all the while being unbearably patient, compassionate, and understanding. 

The book opens in the present when school lets out and Aurora, a teacher, stays late in her classroom. The plot of the book takes place in Aurora’s recent memory while in the present she stares mindlessly off into space in her classroom, alone, the hours passing by. Since everyone in the family calls Aurora to vent their feelings, she becomes the center of the web of contradictory stories that each family member tells. The reader never really knows what truth lies behind these stories.

But it seems that Gabriel, the youngest, was always the mother’s favorite. He became a philosopher but his philosophy of happiness prevents him from ever doing anything constructive with his life. He dreams of great projects like writing a thesis, but starts them and never finishes. Sonia, the oldest, was strongly encouraged by the mother to marry an older man, Horacio, when she was about fifteen, but she divorced him just three years later and now struggles to find love. According to her, he relentlessly abused her sexually and was a perverted man who was aroused by children. Meanwhile, Andrea had dreams of becoming a rock singer and marrying Horacio herself, but she blames her failed life on the mother. 

The reader is tantalizingly exposed to more and more details of this dark history as the book progresses. But Aurora herself is a static, passive character. We don’t see much of her own life or who she is, besides a troubled period with Gabriel and an autistic daughter. Her life is ruled by the stories of others. At the end of the book, the reader expects Aurora to take her life into her own hands and become an active character. But when Aurora realizes the sun has set and she finally leaves the school, she feels liberated from the stories of others and chooses to kill herself by walking in front of a moving vehicle, finally making a decision to choose a peaceful, silent future.

This book was quite enjoyable to read. The author did a great job of revealing more and more of the hidden history between the characters. However, it did feel a bit tacky in the sense that the family secrets were not entirely new. The mother was an overbearing figure, the sisters’ rivalry was based on one sister marrying the man that the other loved, and an older man raping a young bride and even a spoiled younger child are familiar plot points to the reader. In this sense, all the characters seemed slightly stereotypical.
However, this book was quite inventive with its storytelling technique. Since Aurora is the center of all the stories, the plot is mostly revealed through conversations between characters.

But the conversations always bounce between the past and the present, and even between characters. This is an entirely invented example just to illustrate the technique since it’s hard to explain:

Sonia (speaking to Andrea): I told you, Andrea, I don’t like when you say things like that.
Sonia (speaking to Aurora): And she made that face, the one she makes when she disagrees with you.
Aurora (speaking to Sonia): Well, you know how Andrea is sometimes. You should try seeing her side of things.
Sonia (speaking to Aurora): Yes, but then she always says something hurtful.
Andrea (speaking to Sonia): I’m only telling the truth.

I think this book would be well-suited for translation. There is nothing overly cultural in the book that would hinder its translation and there isn’t much word play, if any. The hardest part might be successfully capturing the voice of each character. The author carefully crafted the dialogues so that the reader can follow them, even as the conversation changes between past and present. I also believe the subject matter will travel well in the U.S. The book tells an intriguing story about family secrets and resentments, which many people can relate to or are at least drawn to.

As for the predictability of the plot, although the characters might be somewhat stereotypical, the plot itself was not very predictable. The reader didn’t know what secret or grudge would arise next, or what conclusion the book was pushing towards. And as previously mentioned, the ending was quite unexpected.