Translation Rights TQE / Live as You Can

No matter how many times he hears that he must take life as it comes, and how much his healthnut of a wife tries to make him follow a boringly healthy lifestyle, Luis continues to live under constant stress. His first wife, Carmen, has married his cousin Oscar, a social climber who has not only taken his wife from him, but also the job position that Luis was striving for in the wind power company where he works. Between his mother’s many phone calls to talk about her blood pressure, Luis tries to solve his younger son’s conflicts at school, to worry about the problems that his older children have with designer drugs, to come to terms with the fact that he is still in love with Carmen, and to applaud the actions of a peculiar clown whom he comes to know thanks to his children. Meanwhile, the wind turns the blades of the wind turbines like the hands of a clock counting down the remainder of his life. So between growing pains and experiences that set him at the limit, the unstable balance of the initial situation becomes an uncontrollable imbalance full of hilarious turns. Berges offers us a very funny sitcom where he once again manages to interweave the comical and the profoundly moving.

Joaquín Berges was born in Zaragoza in 1965. He has a degree in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Zaragoza. He started his career as a writer with El club de los estrellados (The Club of the Starred), a surprising first novel whose agility and freshness revealed a wonderful storyteller. It was awarded the prize for the Best Debut Novel written in Spanish in 2009 at the Festival du Premier Roman in Chambéry (France). His following novels, Vive como puedas (Live as You Can, 2011) – selected by FNAC bookshops as “new talent” and a tribute to the genre of classic screwball comedies brought to the present day – and Un estado del malestar (A State of Unrest, 2012), demonstrated his talent for comic novels.