Divorce Is in the Air
A Novel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The American debut of a highly acclaimed Spanish writer: a sly, acerbic novel about love—or the end of love—and how hard it can be to let go.
There’s a lot about Joan-Marc that his second wife doesn’t know—and that he now sets out to tell her, come what may. He begins with his disastrous first marriage to an American named Helen, and the vacation they took in a last-ditch attempt to save their relationship. From there Joan-Marc unfurls the story of his life, from early memories of adolescence to a reckoning with mortality in his forties: friendships he abandoned, women he wronged, the wide swathe he cut across polite society in Madrid and Barcelona. Joan-Marc may be the kind of man we love to hate, yet his caustic wit, nostalgia, and self-pity are ultimately as winning as they are devastating.
Here is an audacious new voice, an unapologetic portrait of an antihero navigating the perilous shoals of modern life—a man struggling with long-held illusions about the inexorable forward march of time.
From the Hardcover edition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his American debut, Torn tells the story of a divorced man who is down on his luck and looking back on what went wrong with the primary romantic relationship of his life. Joan-Marc writes to his second wife about his first wife, Helen, and the various ways the beautiful Helen affected him and ruined him. The book is structured without chapter breaks and mostly in flashbacks about how Helen dressed down Joan-Marc's masculinity, refused to work, and drank all day. Their fights are terrible, full of nasty violence, insults, and sexist clich s. Joan-Marc's first-person narrative bounces between Madrid and Barcelona while he explains how smart he is, and how everyone loves him, and yet his first wife was not able to appreciate his genius or take care of him properly, though the sex was great. Between his father's suicide and his mother's mental illness, Joan-Marc, or "John" as the American Helen calls him, struggles to pull his life back together. Torn has a rich vocabulary, and he takes us into the mind of a miserable man, but readers may find him a less than compelling protagonist to follow.
