El príncipe destronado

In the year of Miguel Delibes' centenary, we recovered one of his most emblematic works, in a special edition of Destino Clásico that includes images of the author and a prologue to one of the most appreciated Spanish black writers in our country, Berna González Harbor, author, among other novels, of The Dream of Reason (2019). The Dethroned Prince is an extraordinary novel about the opaque mystery of childhood. Here Delibes describes the daily life of Quico, a boy who is about to turn four and who has just had a little sister, which is why he has been relegated to the background. Throughout a day, from the time he gets up in the morning until he goes to bed at night, we attend to his adventures, glimpse his secrets and know his anguishes. Delibes focuses just on that moment when the child suffers his first great loss: that of his vital universe as it had been until then. As Berna González Harbor says in the prologue, Quico's character "acquires his own dimension as an individual who, while beginning his life, has also begun to lose it, so early in life." Behind the boy, so admirably recreated, we also see family relationships: the other brothers, the father and mother, the maids; and the city and the world. When the book ends we would like to continue with Quico and his family, because, although nothing extraordinary has happened, it has been fascinating. The book takes place in 1963 and yet it was not published until 1973, a few years before the end of the dictatorship. It is not trivial that it is at this time that Spain began to glimpse unprecedented airs of democracy and allow citizens to have their own thoughts and, therefore, a new look at the world and at oneself. Our prince be well revisited in the need to question everything around us.