Aunque viva cien años

Oviedo, 1936. Of the entire family, only a boy remains standing. The bombs have erased in an instant everything he knew: the warmth of a kitchen, the voice of his brother or mother, afternoons playing soccer, that kiss. And yet, he cannot stay. Only if he manages to flee will he have preserved his life and his memory. Is that, perhaps, what it means to be saved? Even if he lives a hundred years, he raises from the ashes the world that a war destroys, narrated by voices that still do not know it is irretrievable, and confronts it dialectically with the shattered days that follow, where fate is left, in its tragedy, at the mercy of strange faces of indifference or compassion, among whom perhaps an old acquaintance might be found. Two eras intertwine, mutually tensing and, while Cesáreo struggles simultaneously to stay and to leave, to continue being. With this atypical and beautiful novel, Silvia Ribelles de la Vega offers a unique perspective on the last Spanish civil war... and above all: that of those whom history condemns to survive in no man's land. When the idea does not redeem, her story rediscovers for us the liberating virtue of memory and the silent price of forgetting to live.