BOOK REVIEW THE WAITING PLACE Author: Sònia Hernández From the reader report by: Eric Reyes Roher By writing in the first-person plural, with the use of a delicate “us” that creates a collective by aggregating individuals, the narrator of this novel adopts the voice of a generation of children born at the time of the Spanish transition to democracy. Today they are forty-somethings, their enthusiasm for democracy is waning and they are confronted with the inertia of their withered desires. They seem to want to blame others for this: their parents, the State, capitalism, etc. The very great talent of Sonia Hernández lies in her ability to understand the constitutive apprehension of her generation, seeking to generate some form of “impact”, however mediocre and banal they are, like everyone else; to reproduce the mechanical discourse which falls into aporia and immobilism, going round and round in circles like a Beckettian nightmare. El lugar de la espera is the biting and witty biopsy of an indignant and noisy Spanish society, “seeking to win time or to waste it,” indecisive because they have nothing to decide.
PUBLISHED IN NEW SPANISH BOOKS FR
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