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    Learning to Lose: A Novel

    Learning to Lose: A Novel

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    by David Trueba, Mara Faye Lethem (Translator)

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      ISBN-13: 9781590513880
    • Publisher: Other Press, LLC
    • Publication date: 06/22/2010
    • Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
    • Format: eBook
    • Pages: 520
    • File size: 2 MB

    David Trueba was born in Madrid in 1969 and has been successful both as a
    novelist and as a scriptwriter. La buena vida was his widely acclaimed debut as a
    film director and was followed by Obra Maestra (2001), Soldados de Salamina
    (2003), Bienvenido a casa (2006), and La silla de Fernando (2007). He is also the author of two previous novels; his debut, Four Friends, sold over 100,000 copies with twenty reprints.  Learning to Lose won the Critics Award in 2009.
     
    Mara Faye Lethem is the translator of Spanish and Catalan authors such as
    Albert Sánchez Piñol, Juan Marsé, Javier Calvo, Jorge Semprún, and Pablo DeSantis. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she has lived in Barcelona since 2003.

    Read an Excerpt

    Aurora broke her hip in a completely unspectacular way. Getting out of the
    bathtub, she lifted her leg over the edge and suddenly heard a small crunch. She
    felt a slight shiver and her legs turned rubbery. She fell slowly, with time to brush
    the tips of her fingers along the wall tiles and prepare for the impact. Her elbow
    hit the fixtures causing a cold pain and a second later she was lying down, naked
    and overcome, on the still-damp bottom of the bathtub. Papá, she wanted to
    shout, but her voice came out weak. She tried to raise her voice, but the best she
    could do was emit a repetitive, well spaced out lament.
       Papá…Papá…Papá.
       The murmur reaches the little back room, where Leandro is reading the
    newspaper. His first reaction is to think that his wife is calling him for another
    one of her ridiculous requests, for him to get down a jar of spices that’s on too
    high a shelf, to ask him something silly. So he answers with an apathetic what?
    that gets no reply. He leisurely closes the newspaper and stands up. Later he will
    be ashamed of the irritation he feels at having to stop reading. It’s always the
    same, he sits down to read and she talks to him over the radio or the ringing
    telephone. Or the doorbell sounds and she asks, can you get it? when he
    already has the intercom receiver in his hand. He goes down the hallway until
    he identifies where the monotonous call is coming from. There is no urgency in
    Aurora’s voice. Perhaps fatalism. When he opens the bathroom door and finds
    his fallen wife he thinks that she’s sick, dizzy. He looks for blood, vomit, but all
    he sees is the white of the bathtub and her naked skin like a glaze.

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    It is Sylvia’s sixteenth birthday, and her life as an adult is about to begin—not with the party she had been planning, but with a car accident and a broken leg. Behind the wheel is a talented young soccer player, just arrived from Buenos Aires and set for stardom on and off the field. As their destinies collide and a young romance is set in motion, across town, Sylvia’s father and grandfather are finding their own lives suddenly derailed by a violent murder and a secret affair with a prostitute.
    Set against the maze of Madrid’s congested and contested streets, Learning to Lose follows these four individuals as they swerve off course in unexpected directions. Each of them is dodging guilt and the fear of failure, but their shared search for happiness, love, purity, redemption, and, above all, a way to survive, forms a taut narrative web that binds the characters together.
    From one of Spain’s most celebrated contemporary writers, Learning to Lose is a lucid and gripping view into the complexities of lives overturned and into the capriciousness of modern life, with its intoxicating highs and devastating lows.

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