About the book:
Enrique Andrés Ruiz has written a beautiful novel, a masterful example of how life is captured in literature: a choral fabric of small, intimate and revealing plots. Thanks to his talent for reflecting the soul of his characters through a language of rare sensoriality that transmits the texture of words, he manages to endow simple lives with epic quality. In the manner of the works of Joseph Roth or Cesare Pavese, The Young Ladies is the great novel of a bygone era. A classic of today. The Young Ladies is the great novel of a bygone era. A classic of today. “They talk without stopping, without looking up. The continuous murmur of crossed voices. They are sitting on the ground, on hemp mats, the same as on the beach. They paint their toenails. Their backs arched, their gaze fixed on their open toes, separated by cotton. They are no longer young, at least in the eyes of others. They know it halfway, they don’t want to know… »Some books are doors that invite us to discover unknown places in our own lives.«She arrived in Madrid on an early autumn afternoon, still clear. The sky was pale. The Retiro seemed to be still in summer, even though the chestnut trees had lost their greenness and were being bitten by rust: a pang in the heart.»The passing of the seasons and the colours of the canvas that is the sky of Madrid, splash every page. The cinema, the Retiro, the sepulchral silence in the town and the awakening of freedom, the revelry of the city and the first university girls. The secrets that humiliation treasures. The optimistic future and the elongated shadow of a cruel and sad era. The rage of resignation. The dressmaker, the café and the drunken artists of a time that does not seem to be theirs. Las señoritas is, furthermore, a settling of accounts with the anonymous lives of a past that is also ours. An elegant encounter between life and literature.
*Original content provided by the publisher
Reviews:
«Enrique Andrés Ruiz has written a superb book. I am completely in love with what he tells in Los montes viejos about what happens around Soria. It is like the world of South Americans in the eighties, but here it is a voice that rises in a very particular way.» Lídia Jorge«A profound and radical novel, which avoids the usual folkloric-costumbrista temptation and the nostalgic sweetener when it comes to remembering a time and lives lost somewhere in empty Spain.» Ana Rodríguez Fischer, El País«Enrique Andrés Ruiz recovers the heritage of words that mean deeply and returns them to us dressed in the sensitive skin of the voice. How well he encloses time in his book, and how well he reflects what is lost, but also what is immortal!» Jordi Llavina, La Vanguardia«Enrique Andrés Ruiz writes in a way that very few people do any more: forceful, brazen, rich, full of reflections and full of meaning. And he gives us a majestic novel not about the emptied Spain, but about rural Spain, the one we are letting die but from which our deepest roots come.» ELLE«Enrique Andrés Ruiz’s prose is excellent – in the wake of Delibes or Jiménez Lozano – and this would be enough to recommend the book, because the descriptions of the Valonsadero mountain and its surroundings, with minute details about each season of the year, about storms and droughts, about snowfalls, about every corner of the place are magnificent. Novel, essay, chronicle? There is a bit of everything and very well narrated.» Luis Ramoneda, Aceprensa
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/las-senoritas