Méndez Guédez, Juan Carlos – Una tarde con campanas (2004)

Synopsis

One morning, José Luis, a naive but alert South American boy, takes a plane with his family and travels to Spain from his native Latin America. Looking at Madrid, José Luis cries because he doesn't know what the word autumn means and thinks he has arrived in a city full of diseased trees. Thus begins an adventure in the life of this child who does not know so many new words "illegal, foreign, emigrant", but who at the same time will discover in his new existence the value of friendship and the birth of a barely intuited feeling of love. The boy immediately recovers the memory of the country he has left behind and learns by leaps and bounds the keys that allow him to survive in a new reality, in which small daily tragedies such as playing football badly or suffering the initial rejection due to his peculiar way of speaking become grounds for subtle humor. "Una tarde con campanas" is a novel full of emotions, an introduction to life, in which, from the naive gaze of a child, we witness the adventures of his family world, full of sad and smiling anecdotes, in the Spanish and European reality of today. A fun and exciting story in which the everyday blends with magic, the legend with the dreamlike, the Hispano-American culture with the Spanish. "Una tarde con campanas" reveals Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez as a brilliant presence in current novels and confirms the opinion of Alfredo Bryce Echenique for whom the author is "one of the strongest voices in the new Spanish-American narrative"

(SOURCE: Alianza Editorial)