Nostalgia for love during confinement

The effects of the pandemic that began in 2019 and spread across the planet in 2020 have yielded numerous journalistic and, more gradually, literary fruits. In the period following the lockdown, diaries and personal testimonies from authors who experienced that difficult time abounded. Novels have also been appearing: one of this season's biggest hits, Las que no duermen Nash (The Ones Who Don't Sleep) , by Dolores Redondo, takes place in the midst of the outbreak of the disease, which creates the corresponding obstacles for the protagonist.

Now comes a title published in Dutch in 2022: Monterosso mon amour (Acantilado in Spanish/Quaderns Crema in Catalan; translations by G. Fernández Gómez and M. Rosich), which also largely focuses on the lockdown period. The author, with a difficult-to-pronounce surname, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, is a prestigious and award-winning author in the Netherlands, has an extensive bibliography in various genres, and currently resides in Italy.

Acantilado already published a long novel, Grand Hotel Europa , in 2021. He told Núria Escur in this newspaper that "in Europe there's so much past that there's no future left" and that "tourism isn't harmless; it kills cities, it kills their souls." Both concepts inform the recently released book.

⁄ Carmen takes refuge in her imagination and often returns to the memory of a Mediterranean vacation

Monterosso mon amour is a short story, a 111-page novella , a brief and enjoyable read. The protagonist, a Dutch librarian, is married to a diplomat who never rose very far in his career and now enjoys a comfortable and well-paid retirement.

Carmen feels old "because she likes to read." She believes her personal interests and the world's obsessions are increasingly diverging, and, in short, she leads a monotonous life that falls short of what she expected from existence. She takes refuge in her imagination, hungers for great stories, and often returns to the memory of a Mediterranean vacation with her parents as a teenager, where she met an Italian boy she liked and where, beneath the surface of the sea, she received her first kiss.

The arrival of a writer at the library where she volunteers—Pfeijffer himself, a self-caricature—stirs her emotions. At the public event, the author discusses mass tourism and mentions the coastal town of Monterosso, where Carmen experienced that youthful epiphany. In a few days, she will be flying with KLM to Genoa Airport, from where she will travel to the small town that meant so much to her.

In the boarding house run by the beautiful Tiziana, the protagonist will begin her particular search for lost time.

There, in Monterosso, at the boarding house run by the beautiful Tiziana, with a copy of Death in Venice on the bedside table, Carmen will begin her personal search for lost time. Coincidentally, a strange virus that emerged in faraway China has reached Italy, causing authorities to begin closing establishments, limiting hours, and restricting travel. This is also happening in the Ligurian town where the protagonist has settled, now bereft of tourism.

Pfeijffer's Carmen could say, like Sorrentino's Parthenope, that perhaps youth was a wonderful thing... but it didn't last long. The novel by the author from Rijswijk also connects with some recent titles by authors already in their seventies, such as Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan, who, from the third stage of life, cast a retrospective look at their younger years, trying to elucidate what could have been different, or what elements escaped them at the time in order to properly understand what would constitute their lives. Pfeijffer, younger than these greats of British literature (he was born in 1968), has not needed to wait until his age to make a significant contribution on the subject.