Cinco horas con Mario

It was in 1966 when Five Hours with Mario was published for the first time in Spain, without a doubt one of the best novels in Spanish of the 20th century and that has had the greatest impact on the country's cultural imagination, with a multitude of theatrical adaptations throughout the decades. By then, Miguel Delibes was already forty-six years old and had received the highest awards for his work, such as the Nadal Prize (1947), the National Literature Prize (1955) or the Critics Prize (1962), and his narrative mature had reached its zenith. A woman has just lost her husband and watches over the body overnight. On the table there is a book - the Bible - that the wife leafs through. He is reading the paragraphs underlined by the man who is gone forever. A rush of memories comes to mind and a slow, messy monologue begins in which life struggles to become real again. The poor life full of mistakes and clumsiness, of small joys and misunderstandings. Has Carmen ever met Mario? We listen to the irritating, narrow-mindedness of the wife as another man gradually discovers himself, for the reader but not for her, with all his hopelessness and faith in life. Five Hours with Mario is a brilliant novel that exposes the feminine soul to get to the bottom of the Spanish society of its time. Through Carmen's soliloquy, a conservative upper-middle-class woman, Delibes recreates the communication problems in marriage, the provincial society of the time and the conflict of "the two Spains", topics that are still valid today and with full sense in our contemporary reading.