The book just published by the editorial Consonni has been a great surprise to the public. I did not know the work of Montserrat Roig and the finding has been truly surprising. On the one hand, because the novel was first published in a little more than the death of Franco (in 1976) and because it represents with a rigorous view the Barcelona of that time, in which the socioeconomic and political aspects are reflected. On the other hand, because it brings us the story of a family, with the lights and shadows of the members of several generations, but above all the characters that we know from an external view, because it allows us to listen to them from the inner voice, forcing us to relocate our gaze.

Natàlia Miralpeix, after twelve years living in France and England, returns to Barcelona. When the Franco dictatorship arrested Julián Grimau in 1962 and was shot the following year, Salvador Puig Antich re-executed him in 1974. His bourgeois families lived in convulsive times and are between the end of the regime and the promise of freer times, such as pueden.El title was taken from a poetry by

Jean-Baptiste Clément, a song related to the Paris Commune, but the theme can also be the nostalgia for love and happiness. In this novel, we recall the flourishing of childhood and youth and regret the decline of maturity and the vejez.El political commitment is also very present, but it is presented

in a conflictive and not idealized way. In a “good” family there are Catalanism, anarchism, anti-Franco and feminism, and the relations that the protagonist maintains with the working class and with the poor are also raw.

I very much liked, among other things, the homoerotic passages that are described with the desire to live sexuality in freedom, either between ‘hetero’ men, or between ‘hetero’ women; also the part in which the manifestation and detention are counted; or to what extent life can condition the mourning of the most intimate murdered people.

The author was a journalist and the protagonist photographer. On these pages we have the analytical look of the two, which tells us what the rocks and the sunny ones hide on the cover of the book to understand a time of change.