Author: Mara Torres
Publisher: Grupo Planeta
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Well, I'm done with Big July, publishing two reviews a day, every day, without fail. What a stressor that was, but I did it! It cleared a lot of my backlog, too, but not all of it, so I'm going to post a few extra reviews this month, too, especially if they're ebooks. Here comes one of those.
This novel is also available in Spanish as La Vida Imaginaria.
Not to be confused with An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, this is another first person PoV novel which is written by a Spanish journalist and TV personality. I've picked up so many of these 1PoVs in bookstores and libraries, and even when the blurb looks interesting I usually put the thing back on the shelf after I've skimmed the first page and discovered it's a "me, me, ME, all the time" type of novel, but you don't get that choice when it's an audio book or an ebook. You can't skim those to get a feel for the writing, and then put it back if it turns you off.
This one turned me off: not only was it first person voice, it was first person wallowing. Fortunata "Nata" Fortuna has split up with her boyfriend, because he thinks their relationship has changed in unfortunate ways and he wants space for them to miss each other. Apparently that doesn't happen for him; then six months have gone by without a word from him. She's not dealing - unless you define dealing as "wallowing in her misery".
She's doing nothing to get on with life. She's thinking of him constantly, imagining she can fly to his apartment and slip through his window to watch him. She writes her sad, despairing thoughts about him on her computer. She apparently has no support network - either that or the network disintegrated as a result of soaking for far too long in her caustic neediness. She watches an old video of him and her at the beach. She lets her fridge run out of food and drink, yet she buys clothes. She smokes. Yuk. Maybe that's why he left? No one in their right mind wants to date an ashtray. There isn't even any humor to lighten this sodden load of worn-out dirty laundry.
Nata isn't an appealing person at all. I'm not at any loss to see why Alberto left her. I was (at only a fifth of the way through this) at a complete loss to understand why I should even care about her, much less be interested in reading her story. She fails the Bechdel-Wallace test in spades on almost every page since she's all guys all the time, which makes her completely uninteresting. She barely has a thought that's not about a guy and the ones she has about guys offer nothing new or engaging to the reader. Who would want to read about such a vacuous, shallow, and needy person like Nata? Not me.
The format of the novel is not conducive to a comfortable read, either. There are hugely long paragraphs - paragraphs that are longer than some entire chapters (some of which are only two or three sentences) - like the paragraph which begins on page 65 and doesn't break until page 68....
I reached roughly the half-way point (chapter five of part two) and couldn't stand to read any more of this wail-a-thon. I found nothing of interest in it and nothing to recommend. It's a life I certainly don't want to imagine, much less read about.
