Conversation around 'Un amore' by Sara Mesa

Fondazione dell'Albero d'Oro is happy to host a Conversation on Un amore at Palazzo Vendramin Grimani in the presence of author Sara Mesa with Adrián J. Sáez, of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice and Maura Rossi of the University of Padua.

Thursday 14 October at 6.30 pm. Free event reservation mandatory.

Event promoted by La Nuova Frontiera in collaboration with Ca' Foscari University and the University of Padua, Libreria Marco Polo and with the support of Fondazione dell'Albero d'Oro.

Sara Mesa, Un amore, Roma, La Nuova Frontiera, 2021

Ambitious, dizzying, daring: Un amore is a novel in which the protagonists' most unsuspected impulses emerge while the community builds its scapegoat.

Nat, a young translator, has just moved to La Escapa, a small village in rural Spain.

On her first day, her landlord gives her a dog as a gesture of welcome. As time goes by, however, he shows her his true face and the conflicts that arise between them because of the rented house - a dilapidated building full of cracks and leaks - become an obsession for her. The other inhabitants of the area - the shop assistant, Píter, Roberta, the German, the family from the city who spend the weekend there - welcome Nat with apparent normality, but in the background there remains an aura of incomprehension and mutual estrangement.

Escapa, with the omnipresent Mount Glaucus, will eventually acquire a personality of her own, oppressive and confused, which will force Nat to confront not only her neighbours, but also herself and her own failures. Full of silences and misunderstandings, of prejudices and misunderstandings, of taboos and transgressions, Un amore addresses, in a subtle but cohesive way, the question of language not as a form of communication but as a form of exclusion and difference.

Sara Mesa once again confronts the reader with the limits of his or her own personality in an ambitious, dizzying and daring work in which, like in a Greek tragedy, the most unsuspected impulses of its protagonists gradually emerge while, at the same time, the community constructs its scapegoat.

The author

Sara Mesa (Madrid, 1976) is an award-winning Spanish author of short stories and novels. She has published Cuatro por cuatro, a finalist for the Herralde Prize, Cicatrice (Bompiani, 2017), winner of the El Ojo Crítico de Narrativa prize and listed among the books of the year by El País, El Mundo, ABC, El Español, Un incendio invisible, Cara de pan, the short story collection Mala letra and the novella Silencio administrativo. Her latest novel, Un amor, released in 2020, has been critically acclaimed in Spain and is being translated in many countries.

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