Beloved by Empar Moliner

Beloved by Empar Moliner

Spanish (Catalan) fiction

Original title – Benvolguda

Translator -Laura Mcgloughlin

Source – review copy

I was sent this by the lovely folks at three-time Rebel Press. I have reviewed several of their books, as they are trying to give voice to the minority languages around Europe and female writers in those languages. This is a more recent novel from the writer. She has won many prizes in Spain for her fiction, including the Joseph Pla prize. She also writes for Newspapers, television, and radio. I need to mention that part of the profits from this book is going to cancer research as the illustrator of the covers for 3TIMESREBEL. Anna Pont has sadly passed away from Cancer. Her covers for this publisher have all been eye-catching and, I know, thought-provoking as well. So sadly, this is her last cover, and as ever, the image captures a little of the book as we follow Remei, an illustrator in her fifties.

She’s a violinist. The girl sitting in my place (who he will fall in love with) is his new desk-partner at the orchestra where he’s had a permanent post for the last ten years. She’s the stand-in violinist (a friend of the conductor’s friend’s daughter, it seems) who is coming home to rehearse. Danger indeed. All female musicians are sexy. All men have drooled one time or another over imaginary double bass players (always barefoot) playing pieces with sweet vigour.

They sit in pairs when a concert is performed. One music stand for every two musicians. It so happens that the desk-partner who’s sat with him until now has lung cancer.

My man is happy about having a substitute. He doesn’t like his partner at all; he says he stinks, doesn’t study, is very neurotic. He wishes him dead, half in jest.

The time she sees her husband and other violinist

Remei sees herself as an attractive, happy fifty-year-old. This is until she is heading out with her younger husband. He is a violinist in an orchestra, and as she is in the car, she sees a flicker of something between him and the person sitting next to him in the front of the car, a fellow violinist from the orchestra; she knows what she has seen even thou her husband denies this is the case. What follows is a look at Remei’s life and how she has battled to get where she is today, but this one evening has brought it all tumbling down, and now the horror of being in her fifties and maybe her younger husband will fall for the younger violinist sat next to him. She has done all the sports she can. Remei Duran has tried to stay an attractive woman of a certain age. But This is a view of heartbreak happening because of the way age can sap sexual energy.

All of a sudden I start coughing a lot too. Of course you never realise the exact moment it appears, but I do because for the first time in my life with this very dry cough, I fully understand ads for incontinence pads.

This is it. It’s been years since I coughed and I didn’t know, it hadn’t even occurred to me, what happens to a woman of my age (who runs and has given birth) when you cough this way. They told me about laughing, but not this.

All of a sudden it’s happening to me. All of a sudden. Not little by little, as it should have, to have time to get used to it and sign up for hypopressive gymnastics and buy a box of vaginal tablets. A quaver of trumpet and timpani. And those ads I’ve always found humiliating seem so friendly now. I’m the same person I was a day ago. Yesterday, in a jeans outlet shop (cheap because they’re the ones worn by mannequins tried on a pair in size 8, because they were lovely and because I wanted to debut a pair

Remei trying to keep a hold of the past

This is one of those book that is hard to capture. It is about that moment in the book when she sees her world shatter about being a woman of a certain age, no matter how much you have battled to where. What happens when menopause has taken over your life, and your husband now has this younger model sitting next to him? They don’t know what will happen, but she sees it just a little moment in the back of that car, little things that make her know what will happen. We also see how hard she has tried to stay the way she is. As always, this is what I like about the books from 3timesrebel Press. They publish those books you’d not see otherwise. This is a powerful account of how menopause can break a woman but also make her stronger, from heartbreak to hope. Have you read any of the books from 3timesrebel ?

Winstons score – A one-womans tale has a universal ring to it