Blitz
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Learning to Lose, David Trueba's new novel about a young Spanish architect's affair with an older German woman.
Blitz is a romantic tragicomedy that recounts the exploits of Beto, a young architect who heads to Munich with his girlfriend to take part in a landscape-planning competition. In an instant, a text message Beto wasn't meant to receive shatters him, leaving him bewildered and heading nowhere. But unintentionally he falls into the arms of Helga, an older woman, in a cross-generational encounter that is the heart of the tale.
With sensitivity and biting wit, Trueba crafts a story of errant souls and lost loves, humorously critiquing male narcissism, all the while showing us that in this modern age it is more important than ever to appreciate every moment and embrace intimacy when luck allows it, no matter from where.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Adulthood is attained almost by accident in Trueba's lively and amusing novel. For Beto, a 30-year-old Spanish landscape architect preparing to present his plan for a park containing "a forest of human-sized hourglasses" at the international Lebensg rten Conference in Munich, the lunge forward is initiated by a text message from his girlfriend Marta even though it's not meant for him. Marta is planning to leave Beto for an ex-lover; shaken by this revelation of her infidelity, Beto takes his anger out on a more successful colleague, fellow Spaniard Alex Ripoll s. But Ripoll s's role as Beto's professional nemesis isn't as definite as Beto thinks. Likewise, Helga, the kind, older conference volunteer, may mean more to Beto than just a place to spend the night after he strands himself in Germany rather than returning to the apartment he shares with Marta in Madrid. Trueba's (Learning to Lose) gentle satire of youthful aimlessness is set against the background of the financial crisis, and his bumbling, self-pitying, but ultimately sympathetic Beto proves a talented guide through a largely predictable world of disappointments, reversals, and occasional joys. Readers will be gratified, but not surprised, to learn via an esteemed architect Beto admires that life is like a garden: "Beauty comes down to appreciation... the passage of time is the perfect expression of transience, and it's precisely this fleeting quality that endows each vital stage with significance."
