One day, the last day of August, Esnaola places her first novel on the border day when the holidays end and the day comes to return to work. If time is limited, so is space in this short novel, because it takes place in a tight and small space: in a hotel room between suitcases, not in a place where even the city has no name, the SS. In the small coastal town. In this room there are mainly two women, one looking out of the window at the sea, looking at life and the other ready to go out or enter looking at the door.

The sea, the window, the suitcase and the door set the story of Esnaola. Nora sits by the window overlooking the sea, while the hotel manager’s daughter sits by the door, waiting for Sebastian (Nora’s husband), ready to escape. One is looking at life, death, believing in the impossibility of relationships. She supposedly loves her husband, but her husband is a nanny, he loves children. Nora is beautiful and takes advantage of this sexual appeal to sleep with a different man every night. In this whirlwind of love, the hotel manager blindly falls in love with her and asks her to stay with her forever. The metaphor of all these relationships is the galerna that gives the novel a narrative tension. And Nora looks out the window and sees everything, the arrival of the gallery, the lie of feelings and the explosion.

The teenage daughter of the director of the hotel presents herself to us as Lolita, at the door, waiting to escape with Sebastian, who is married, and willing to have sinful relationships that she never lives, but at the end of the novel she inclines all her discourse to the lack of love of her father. The two women lead the confusing garden of feelings: with their thematic focus on power roles, gender, infidelity, hidden or illicit relationships. And with them they have husbands that don’t exist, fathers that don’t exist and the eternal rivalry between women.

Waiting for Galerna, in an inexorable place, the two women converse with each other in the midst of sargoric relations. And there would be the turning point of the novel; this is what ends the novel, taking it out of romantic love and completely questioning the traditional family. Nora breaks the ticket for the train that she was going to share with her husbands and goes alone. The director’s daughter unpacks her bags and prioritizes staying with her father who never had one.

Esnaola is a novel that is read with pleasure, but for my image there are added elements to be able to treat it so short. In fact, a little more development of the elements and topics of interest that it has with it would have done no harm to this galerna of love.