I haven’t been able to find a good book to listen to in Spanish in two months and this put me into a vile mood. I drive and I need to listen to something while driving. I will be on the road at midnight tonight, for example, going to fetch an unwell friend from the airport. On Friday I will be on the road for a total of up to three hours. Which is great. I love it. But I also need some listening material.
Finally yesterday I came across a novel by a Spanish author, Jacobo Bergareche. The author reads it himself and he’s the perfect voice actor for his own book. The novel is excellent, so much so that I actually already finished it and am now experiencing the same conundrum of not having anything to listen to in Spanish when I go on the road.
Leaving aside my drama of endless book-searching, here is what makes the novel so interesting. Los días perfectos talks about Luis, a liberal, low-earning, middle-aged Spanish journalist in a dead marriage to a much more successful wife. In a work-related trip to Austin, Texas, Luis starts a tawdry affair with a random Mexican woman. The work trip is short and the affair only lasts for three days. A year later Luis returns and has another short sojourn with the same random Mexican woman. When he tries to repeat this escapade for the third year in a row, his paramour refuses to meet him and Luis composes a long imaginary letter to her explaining why their affair meant so much to him.
Luis is pathetic, weak, and excessively prattly. Everything in life is relative, though. Luis comes off as a paragon of happy masculinity in comparison to the main character of Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription. I would have despised Luis if I hadn’t read Transcription first. His rebellion through sporadic infidelity (the random Mexican woman is, of course, not the first of his random infidelities) does not inspire much respect but at least he does consider himself entitled to rebel. Luis’s narrative voice could not appear in a novel published in English because it’s not remotely subservient enough to the ruling ideology.
Bergareche’s novel is a reminder of the unevenness of ultra liberal ideological conditioning. Luis a reminder that we are not completely cooked.
If you are going to read the book, I recommend listening to the Audible version instead because it makes half of the novel’s charm.
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