La casa de les belles adormides

Patricia Fonseca, atolondrada niña bien y reina del papel couché, nunca imaginó al embarcarse en el Aloha, por equivocación, que allí conocería al hombre de sus sueños: Bruno Frías, el capitán del velero.Bruno se ha propuesto llegar desde Puerto Banús hasta Bilbao rigurosamente a vela. Por el camino se las verán con Lady Godiva, una peligrosa borrasca que les espera en la Costa de la Muerte de Galicia. Por primera vez en su vida, Patricia conocerá lo que significa luchar por algo y descubrirá que el capitán tiene muchas virtudes y un solo defecto: está casado.

Pocas cosas existen tan cargadas de magia como las pala bras de un cuento. Ese cuento breve, lleno de sugerencias, dueño de un extraño poder que arrebata y pone alas hacia mundos donde no existen ni el suelo ni el cielo. Los cuentos representan uno de los aspectos más inolvidables e intensos de la primera infancia. Todos los niños del mundo han escuchado cuentos. Ese cuento que no debe escribirse y lleva de voz en voz paisajes y figuras, movidos más por la imaginación del oyente que por la palabra del narrador.

Neil, the narrator, is a middle-aged man who hasn't been doing too well either personally or professionally. If there is something that he remembers with enthusiasm, it is the Culture and Civilization classes that he received from an exceptional teacher: Elizabeth Finch. Intelligent and unattainable, full of elegance, this admirer of the classical world considered that the world had taken the wrong path the day the Roman Empire decided to embrace Christian monotheism. That is why her hero was the last pagan emperor: Julian the Apostate. When he stopped being her student, Neil kept in touch with Elizabeth, and they ate together periodically. Now the admired teacher has died, and her former disciple undertakes a double task: to write an essay on Juliano based on the notes and questions she left behind, and to investigate the biography of that enigmatic woman through the notebooks she has bequeathed to him. Who really was the elusive and fascinating Elizabeth Finch? What mysteries did her personality hide? Where does admiration end and love begin? What can we learn from history and culture? What is it that gives meaning to our lives? Playing once again with genres and their limits, Julian Barnes has written a novel that is also a philosophical musing and a biographical reconstruction through which he pays homage, in a more or less veiled way, to a very dear friend, a deceased English writer.