Review of the book “The Reckless Heart” by Carmen Amoraga.
By Paqui Bernal.
“The Reckless Heart” is a love story between two mature people. Tina and José Manuel currently live in Valencia. They are married but immersed in routine lives, with a hopelessness that makes it difficult for them to discern if their husbands still love them or if they themselves still have affection for them.
José Manuel is Tina’s mother’s family doctor, and it is with the excuse of following up with her that they begin a relationship, a crush so adolescent that they are both surprised to still be able to have those sensations and feelings. ”If Victoria asks him, he will probably tell her the truth: that he is stupid, immature, a moron who on the verge of retirement has fallen in love like a child with nothing more than a voice, the effect that voice has on him. him, of what he is thanks to that voice.”
It is probably more difficult for the protagonists to accept it because they are accustomed to the duality between the life we lead and the one we would like to lead, a duality that is the central idea of the novel according to its author.
I have been very struck by Amoraga’s detailed and profound knowledge of what we call “the human soul”, its contradictions, its weaknesses and the perenniality of love – not only towards the couple but also towards the family. -.
The author knows how to create questions, increase tension by dosing information, and balance the chapters of the novel almost perfectly. No wonder this is her last novel after nine more, with which she has won several awards – including the Nadal Prize in 2014 -.
Amoraga defines it as a novel of manners but, if I may have an opinion, I believe that intimacy weighs more in the story. The author takes us beyond identification with the characters. She makes us admire protagonists who apparently live in an environment and in a way that hardly differs from those of any middle-class citizen, ordinary people. And I like that “epic of everyday life” and it seems more difficult to achieve than the epic that arises in more extraordinary conflicts or in spaces very different from ours. Furthermore, the realism of her fiction does not in the least diminish the good fiction quality of it.
To everything I have listed we must add the continuous and surprising twists of the plot. In short, I consider that there are more than enough reasons to recommend reading “The Reckless Heart.”
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/el-corazon-imprudente-opinion
