Temps enrere

Way Back When | Proa, 2022


The great novel by Ramon Solsona, set between Spanish immigrant communities in Germany and the vineyards of El Priorat.

Elvira and Tomàs pass backward through the tunnel of time: from mobile phones to early-model black-and-white TVs, from professional success to their humble origins. They cross through love and lovelornness, health and illness, life changes, the discovery of sexuality, getting younger and younger until their whole future is ahead of them, waiting to be written.

For everyone, time passes: for Elvira, born in El Priorat, a harsh world before the wine revolution; for Tomàs, the son of a doorman living in a basement apartment. Time passes, too, for the families that emigrated to Germany in the sixties. And it passes for an entire tapestry of characters full of stories and humanity. As the years pass, and Elvira meets her friends again, “together, they form an encyclopedia of lives lived. Their reunion is a “mirror, true, perhaps cruel, of their journey through the tunnel of time.”