Mixing enigmas of history with the equally mysterious vicissitudes of some characters makes up a winning set in a historical novel. It is only necessary that the substantial, the story and the style, accompany with grace.
And as Álvaro Arbina already demonstrated in his previous work The woman with the clock, style and narrative tension come standard.
In the case of The Symphony of Time, a new great novel awaits us. Because the author distributes the plot as a magician does with playing cards. From the complementary scenarios to the great knot of the narrative proposal, everything slides with the tension and naturalness of some characters who play their role with that necessary authenticity towards reading empathy.
From the booming Basque society to the whole of a nineteenth-century Europe that moves from dark ages to modernity and its social imbalances.
The essential mechanism of progress, latent conflicts, small details that escape official history. The author feeds on all this to turn a historical period into an adventure towards the discovery of underlying truths, or also into a thriller where he suffers with the characters and enjoys a captivating reading, accompanied by a delicious setting.
The plot is full of small circumstances and transcendental scenarios in the merely historical, and that advance intertwining, with that narrative art that allows the crossing of magical scenes and that ends up functioning as a whole, like the perfect gear that transforms a novel into a bestseller .
Mysterious disappearances and socio-political economic struggles, scientific advances that point to great discoveries capable of changing everything, discoveries that amaze the reader and moments in which stopping reading is entirely impossible.
The feeling that History has advanced on many occasions through secrets and hidden interests always approaches us with signs of complete certainty. This novel invites us to a multitude of speculations about that time in which humanity was peering into its most hopeful and at the same time darker future, the XNUMXth century.
You can now buy the novel The symphony of time, Álvaro Arbina's new book, here: