Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

LA CONFORMISTA

Alba Dedeu

A beautiful debut novel by the Mercè Rodoreda Awarded author Alba Dedeu. An exquisite, thought-provoking & unsettling, Dedeu offers a conversation around the consequences on conformity & the multiple paths our lives could take.

Pere and Eva sell rotisserie chicken and the smell of the cooking fat follows them around all day, every day, and everwhere they go. The work routine, the inevitable frictions of being a a couple and, later on, the obligations and worries of raising a family give Eva the feeling that her life is little in comparison with the dreams she had as a youngster. As in her short stories, Alba Dedeu narrates with delicacy and precision the ups and downs, the self-sacrifices and satisfactions of living with another person, and the low charge of anxiety that surrounds the two characters and, ultimately, all of us: the vertigo induced by the infinite possibilities apparently within our reach and the constant uncertainty of not knowing if, among so many options, we have made the best choice. Alba Dedeu (Granollers, 1984) lives in Barcelona and works as a literary translator. Her first work of fiction, Gats al parc (2011), won the Mercè Rodoreda Short Story Prize and the Serra d'Or Prize. That was followed in 2012 by L'estiu no s'acaba mai (Proa, 2012), a short story collection that was well received among critics and readers alike. La conformista (L'Altra, 2024) is her first novel.

Available products
Book Published 2024-02-01 by L’Altra Editorial

Comments

Spanish: Sexto Piso ; Brazilian: Tordesilhas

A film by Aki Kaurismaki made into a novel: a fantastic anti-epic story about the working class and the life of a couple. Alba Dedeu is an artist of detail and underground discomfort.

Alba Dedeu goes to the heart of the matter.

The routine of work, the inevitable frictions of living as a couple and the obligations and worries of raising a family make the protagonist a younger woman. Alba Dedeu narrates with delicacy and precision the ups and downs, the renunciations and misgivings of living together, and the low-intensity anguish that surrounds the two characters.

If we look at literary beginnings, this would be considered a prospect of Catalan literature.

A voice that recounts the comings and goings of an ordinary life, identifying little obvious emotions and narrating things we all know as if they were new, a voice that we enter as if it were that of our best friend and to which we nod quietly because there is nothing more to add.