When their friend and neighbour Manuel is left an in coma after a car accident, Julio, a film set designer, and his wife, Laura, a masseuse in an urban spa, begin to journey down strange ways. The fact that they live in an apartment that is a mirror image of their neighbours has something to do with it, as does the fact that Julio become attracted to the land of shadows, a world that he first created to entertain a child but which then he develops for himself. Meanwhile, Laura enters into a strange correspondence of her own that lacks any recipient. Laura and Julio looks at the eternal triangle once again, although in this case the third party never makes an appearance. A self-proclaimed genius, his presence is so strongly felt that it undermines the existential essence of the married couple as they separately attempt to assimilate what he means to each of them. Millas has firmly rooted this comic and painful novel in his on-going investigation of the human individual, always in search of the panacea that will cure all its fears and discomforts, torn between submerging itself into a partnership or struggling free from one as a newly fledged personality, and all the time lost in a world of illusions and delusions. On its release in Spain, Laura and Julio rapidly ran up sales of over 150,000 copies, which left no one surprised. Juan Jose Millas is one of Spain’s most loved and respected authors, who appeals to a broad spectrum of readers and at a multitude of levels.
Author
Juan José Millás is a Spanish writer and winner of the 1990 Premio Nadal. He was born in Valencia and has spent most of his life in Madrid where he studied Philosophy and Literature at the Universidad Complutense. His first novel was influenced by Julio Cortázar and consequently shows the influence of the then-prevalent literary experimentalism, as well as the uncertainty of a fledgling author. Although very original, his second book, Cerbero son las sombras (1975), obtained the Premio Sésamo and received a positive critical response. Thanks to an enthusiastic member of the judges panel for the Premio Sésamo, Juan García Hortelano, he was able to publish Visión del ahogado (1977) and El jardín vacío (The empty garden) (1981) with the prestigious publisher Alfaguara. But his most popular novel was Papel mojado (1983), an assignment for a publisher of young adult literature that was a commercial success and continues to sell well. Simultaneously, he began to publish articles in the Spanish press with great success, so he left the employment of the Iberian press and now makes a living as a journalist and author. In his numerous works, which are mostly psychological and introspective, any daily fact can become a fantastic event. He created his own personal literary genre, the articuento, in which an everyday story is transformed into a fantasy that allows the reader to see reality more critically. His weekly columns in El País have generated a great number of followers who appreciate the subtlety and originality of his point of view in dealing with current events, as well as his commitment to social justice and the quality of his writing. On the program La Ventana, on the channel Ser, he has a time slot (Fridays at 4:00) in which he encourages viewers to send short accounts about words from the dictionary. Currently, he is constructing a glossary, within which these accounts have a large role. His works have been translated into 23 languages, among them: English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch. In his 2006 novel, titled Laura y Julio, we find his principal obsessions expressed: the problem of identity, symmetry, other inhabitable spaces within our space, love, fidelity, and jealousy.
