It’s very sad to see a novel that’s so bad that its own author realizes it and tries to explain its meaning in a postscript. Rosa Montero is not one of my favorite writers but I didn’t expect something quite as lousy from her.
The novel’s protagonist is a 60-year-old Soledad, the whiniest, most superficial and entitled character I’ve encountered in a while. I’ll give just one example to illustrate the caliber of this human being. Soledad’s neighbor, a young single mother loses her job and can’t pay her bills. When she shares with Soledad that her electricity has been cut off, the well-off Soledad concludes that the dramas of the unemployed during the economic crisis are nothing compared to the hardship she experiences as a result of being dumped by yet another casual boyfriend.
Montero didn’t even bother doing research for the book. The male prostitute in her book is Russian but he couldn’t behave less Russian if he tried. He doesn’t celebrate New Year’s, speaks several languages fluently in spite of having no education and having been raised in a Russian orphanage, and is desperate to marry a black woman and adopt her child. If this is normal behavior in a Russian electrician / prostitute, I’m Montserrat Caballe.
God, what a shitty, shitty novel.
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