Violeta [English Edition]: A Novel

No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they’ll take it back.

“Exert some independence; you’re not a little girl. You can’t let anyone else decide things for you. You have to take care of yourself in this world,” she said.

implacable,

That’s how I spent my adolescence, our period of Exile, which I remember as the most diaphanous time of my life.

There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember.

prosaic

He said that tools and manual labor were the common language of men and that there were no barriers to communication when two men worked side by side.

According to the poem by Antonio Machado, “there is no road, the road is made by walking,” but in my case it felt more like I was stumbling down narrow, winding paths that were often swallowed up by vegetation.

No nation had wanted to report the true number of deaths. Only Spain, who had remained neutral in the conflict, shared news of the illness, which is why it ended up being called the Spanish influenza.