SERIES:Narrativas hispánicas
A high school teacher sits at home waiting for the supermarket delivery service. The delivery man is late, so she decides to leave. Hours later she finds that the shopping has been left at her neighbour’s house and that the frozen food has been spoiled. She phones the supermarket to complain. The next day, Saturday, she is still in her sleeping t-shirt when the doorbell rings: it is the delivery man, an Ecuadorian immigrant with a job at the local supermarket. The man says that because of her call he has been fired. The teacher regrets the incident, but the man insists: she is responsible for his dismissal, she must find him another job, if not he will always be there, at her front door or at the places that she visits every day, waiting. From that moment, the life of the teacher changes, as does that of her husband, her older daughter, who is an active member of a political movement, and finally, also the life of her 13-year-old son. With El padre de Blancanieves, Belén Gopegui, continues her acute investigation of the borders between private and public spaces.
TRANSLATION RIGHTS SALES
- France (Seuil)
- Portugal (Ediçoes 70)
- Brazil (Almedina)
Belén Gopegui was born in Madrid in October 1963. In 1992 she published the novel La escala de los mapas, which had an extraordinary impact: “An overwhelmingly powerful work… the stunning thing about this novel is the originality of its narrative strategy in full concordance with the rhythm of its prose” (Carmen Martín Gaite). After her fascinating second novel, Tocarnos la cara (1995), with the third, La conquista del aire (1998), she took a definitive step forward: “A perfect novel” (Francisco Umbral). In 2001 she wrote her fourth novel, Lo real: “Belén Gopegui is the writer who produces the best and wisest example of the novel as an instrument of investigation, reflection and political analysis, in the widest possible sense: that relating to the question of the polis” (Ignacio Echevarría, El País). Her fifth novel was El lado frío de la almohada:“The only surprise provided by each new novel by Belén Gopegui is not its quality —something that we can take for granted— but finding out the way she has succeeded” (Rafael Conte, El País). And, in 2007, she wrote her sixth novel, El padre de Blancanieves: “A serious and important work that deserves to be read, because, aside from being interesting because of the plot that sustains it, it urges a reflection on reality”. (Santos Sanz Villanueva, El Cultural); “The reader is seduced by a prose that aims to show reality in ways that are similar to certain works by Godard or through the films of Kluge, Fassbinder, etc.” (Joaquín Arnáiz, La Razón); “With this novel, she reaches her most ambitious heights” (Rafael Conte, El País). Her novels have been translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Turkish, German, Portuguese, Polish, Finnish, Serbian and Dutch.
