Las transiciones

Germany / Berenberg Verlag

“The Transitions manages to imprint a generational tone to the particular experiences of its characters, related to the narrow boundaries of a small capital portrayed at the end of The Dictatorship, that is approached through the evolution of its main characters, including the narrator himself, whom he presents in two different critical stages, the passage from childhood to adolescence and from youth to maturity.” Ignacio
F. Garmendia, Diario de Sevilla

“Sentimental chronicle of a generation that went from playing with the collecting cards of the middle‐class Catholicism and the itchiness of sex and the political periphery to become the leading youth of a censorship‐ free future. Sociology, personal story, coming‐to‐age film between memory and fiction, the collective and personal lives as homage and therapy.” Guillermo Busutil, La Opinión de Málaga

“Just three books within a couple of years had been enough for Vicente Valero to stand out as one of the greatest representatives of recent Spanish narrative. There will be who states that others make it in one stroke, but let’s admit that shaking off the poet branding –field in which the author performed his first literary feats– and obtain credibility as prosaist is something more difficult than it seems.” Alejandro Luque, Mercurio

(The Transitions) Franco’s death and the political transition become the backdrop in which the main characters of Ibizan writer Vicente Valero’s new novel function, “four inseparable friends” who live their own particular transition, from childhood to adolescence, in a tumultuous epoch of fast and unpredictable changes, and in a small closed community, insular, devoted mainly to tourism. The narrator casts back to that time that was –beyond its political significance– a rich background for discoveries, fears, expectations, in which adults had to adapt to the new circumstances and find a new lace in the new looming society that was being inaugurated, under the attentive and often bemused look of adolescents.
The friends reunion 20 years after to attend the burial of  one of them provokes a double remembrance: that of those childhood years and the day of the dead friend’s funeral, when the “inseparable friends” then already youngsters transitioning into maturity. Once again, an inspired Valero offers us a magnificent work on both the individual and collective memories. Novel of transitions, in which its author, with a prose that collects with the same expressiveness affection and humour, the historical facts and the personal impressions, fiction and reality, it pictures an essential portrait of the Children of The Transition.