Blai Bonet

El mar

INFORMATION

El mar (the sea), when it was published, exploded like a scandalous star. The protagonists are twenty-year-old boys who live in a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, devoured internally by a certain death and an imperious yearning to live. Agustí Villaronga, who adapted the novel to cinema, writes: "Blai's sea is sordid and luminous, beautiful, disturbing, poetic and full of love for his characters. Death and religion shape it. Religion is treated as an attitude to life in response to the enigma of one's own existence. Death is not abstract but like a plague that kills from the very body that gives life, and that also chooses very young children, children who open up to life. Death is the monster, the Alien, the murderer and the danger. As in any horror movie. But here it has no face or form and works from the caverns of the lungs of the protagonists. 

Translated since 2002 into most European languages (Spanish, English, French, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Serbian, Slovenian), it forms part of the works that time turns into long-sellers. 

Source: the publisher