In his speech, in his body language, even in his tone, one discovers a Juan Jose Millas philosopher, the quiet thinker capable of analyzing and exposing everything in the most suggestive way: narrative fiction.
Literature for Millás is a bridge towards those small great vital theories that approach every writer with concerns. And his characters end up shining precisely because of that psychological depth that is immersed in all of us as readers. Because the circumstances are diverse but the ideas, emotions and sensations are always the same, diversified in each soul that feels, thinks or is moved.
Lucía is one of those enormous Millás characters who suddenly faces the void, discovering in him that it is not so. Perhaps that occupied space, until the moment of breaking of everyday life, was just a closed closet, full of old clothes and the smell of mothballs.
When she loses her job, Lucía discovers that it is time to live, or to try. The story then acquires that dreamlike point at times, the fantastic as an argument by the author to connect with who we really are, beyond the daily inertia, social conventions and the standard.
Lucia shines like a new star, approaches her past with melancholy but decides to put her time back together today. On board the taxi with which he will move through the cities of his life or of his wishes, he will wait for the passenger with whom he shared fleeting and special encounters, waiting for that magic repudiated by routine to materialize.
Life is risk. Or it should be. Lucía discovers, in that anxiety that it is to find herself outside the essential mechanism of society, that loneliness scares, even alienates. But only then will Lucía delve into what she is, what she needs and what she feels.
No more bloated sensations, no blind inertia. Only the basics can really make Lucia something. Love in essence starts from me, from now and what I have next to me, everything else is artifice.
Lucía's fantastic life journey ends up splashing us all, with an undeniable vindictive aspect of fear as the beginning of rebellion, of loneliness as a necessary counterpoint to value the company.
Lucía represents a fantastic struggle between what we think we feel and what we really feel in that plot buried by tons of customs, circumstances and defenses.
You can now buy the novel Let no one sleep, the new book by Juan José Millás, here: