(Lenin's Carer) “My father went crazy for twenty-one days in the summer of 2011, after a routine operation whose complications remain, even today, inexplicable. During those three weeks he claimed to be Lenin and asked to be treated as such, demanding that his medical report and medication supplied to him were  written in the name of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. The physicians agreed to such an identity change, although they continued to call him Mr. R., something he certainly disliked. Otherwise, his character hardly changed, he was still the same hardened joker as usual.”
This is the novel of of someone who is as much of one place as of another. It is also the story of an outcast: a young university professor, son of a working class father and grandson of farmers. From La Mancha to Catalonia, from the aesthetics of the plow to the Aesthetics in capital letters. This is a novel about kin love and political love, about class struggle when there’s little strength left for the fight and the fight has been capitalised by a bunch of political parties and reduced to mere slogans.
Mixing humor and seriousness, even when death or madness are the topics of conversation, this is a novel that makes us smile amidst melancholia without neglecting “the possibility of uprising”.
Most importantly, this an exemplary novel for this time of uncertainties. «Exemplary» for what it reveals in a time with no revelations left. And it does so not in a taxing manner, but a cordial one: it proposes a dialogue.