Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Unavailable
Uppsala Woods
Unavailable
Uppsala Woods
Unavailable
Uppsala Woods
Ebook182 pages3 hours

Uppsala Woods

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

2.5/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this ebook

"'I prefer a divorce to a funeral.' Realizing that my words, however harsh they may seem, conceal a declaration of love, perhaps the most sincere declaration of love I've ever made to her, she collapses on the sofa and bursts into tears." This is the climax of Uppsala Woods, an amazing novel in which Álvaro Colomer looks at life's painful issues with a light-hearted and, at times, funny edge.
When, on his fifth wedding anniversary, Julio gets back home and his wife is nowhere to be found, he feels an omen of doom. From this point forward, the author takes the reader on an increasingly frenzied search for his wife and through the searing abyss faced on a daily basis by those attached to somebody who has grown tired of living.
The underlying themes of this humor-ridden drama are loneliness, shame, fear and particularly anger at an impassive society that is unwilling to reflect on one of its worst ailments. When all else fails, the power of love once again turns out to be the only way out.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 21, 2013
ISBN9788494174438
Unavailable
Uppsala Woods

Related to Uppsala Woods

Related ebooks

Literary Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Uppsala Woods

Rating: 2.6666666666666665 out of 5 stars
2.5/5

3 ratings1 review

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A friend’s blog persuaded me to give Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream (see here) a go, and I thought the novel excellent – and was intrigued by the fact it had inspired a “Nocilla generation” of writers in Spain. So I decided to see how this had manifested, and Colomer’s Uppsala Woods looked like the most interesting of the novels labelled as “Nocilla” I could find. Having now read it… I’m not entirely sure what Mallo brought to it, other than perhaps a circumspect prose style which uses excessive detail; and while I like that, I like detail, I write it myself, the story of Uppsala Woods proved to be something of a let-down. The narrator is an entomologist and his wife has been suffering from depression. He comes home from work one day and discovers she has tried to commit suicide by swallowing pills. This reminds him of an actual suicide he witnessed as a boy – a neighbour jumped off a seventh-floor balcony while he watched – and which traumatised him so badly he grew up into the weak-willed and indecisive human being he is now. There’s a lot of reflection on his self-perceived failings, and how it feeds into his response to his wife’s attempted suicide. It doesn’t help that the marriage had been failing, and he’s incapable of making the concessions needed to rescue it. In fact, he’s not a very nice person at all. And there’s a whiff of misogyny to the narrative which is unpleasant, not to mention a definitely old-fashioned view of suicide as a form of “lunacy”. I liked the prose style and thought it effective, but found the story disappointing and its sensibilities a little old-fashioned for me. I’d like to further explore the Nocilla generation, but I hope they’re better than Uppsala Woods. Incidentally, the English translation of the third book of Mallo’s trilogy, Nocilla Lab, is due in January next year, and I’m looking forward to it. Mallo has written other novels and I’d like to read them – but they’ve yet to be translated into English. Perhaps I should learn Spanish… I mean, there are those Cuban authors I’d like to read too…