Changes are happening around us at breakneck speed. The new, the latest assault our reality at a speed that we probably did not know a few years ago.
And we are assuming it ...
But sometimes it is time to stand up. There are spaces, impregnable redoubts of the identity of a neighborhood, a town or a city.
Because there are places that are not simple soils on which to plan new urban projects. They are sanctuaries of the memory of several generations of inhabitants of one of those places.
This is what this novel tells us about, about the union of forces of Rosemary, an octogenarian from London from the Brixton neighborhood, with Kate, a cosmolite girl who finds in Rosemary's lost cause a true bastion in defense of the city as a space for citizens .
With the loss of the old Brixton swimming pool, the neighborhood would be stripped of the physical anecdote about which stories gathered here and there among the inhabitants of the neighborhood flourished.
Kate could survive without that swimming pool, assuming as a young woman of her time that cities are transforming as if they were inside a supermarket, waiting for the best strategy to lead passersby towards this inexhaustible consumption.
And the real decadence is not the image of an old swimming pool that surely needed a coat of paint and some considerable repairs. What is truly decadent is allowing modernity to strip every space of that splendid human sensation of the old, of what remains in the face of more or less necessary changes ...
Kate understands that more life can be found in Rosemary than in a city besieged by piranhas of speculation. And he will join her in defending the pool, using his newspaper platform to raise awareness.
The emotion is served in that opposition between memories and the future, where the new is better sold but the old maintains the melancholic feeling of an identity without which we are just gray guys drinking coffee at a starbucks.
You can now buy the novel Dreaming Underwater, Libby Page's new book, here: