Vicente Valero

Los extraños

INFORMATION

(According to the editorial) According to Tolstói's famous definition, all families have their strangers: those individuals of whom perhaps only a handful of scattered news is preserved and who, nevertheless, are alluded to with certain frequency by some enigmatic event, by their peculiar trade or by the very force of their singular personality, which forced them to stay away from the ordinary becoming of the family. Faces, therefore, fleeing, often at the frontier of being forgotten.

In order to rescue them from this last frontier and to satiate an ancient curiosity - the pure and naive one that comes from the unconnected stories heard during childhood - the narrator brings together in this extraordinary book four of his strangers to try to reconstruct, using the few inherited memories but also venturing into personal investigations (trips, documents, etc.), the vital trajectory of each one of them, their ambitions and failures, as well as to determine what was the main reason for their strangeness and, therefore, their estrangement.

And in this approach, the narrator - perhaps the true protagonist of this book - not only discovers surprising facts and confluences, but also gets to know better the identity and course of a common family, with its forgetfulness and affections, its fears and hopes.

A history of African military men, commanders of the Second Republic, professional chess players and dancers. And the backdrop is colonial Africa, the Spanish civil war, exile in France, the Ibiza of the seventies.