La vida promesa

This is not a real story, but almost, because the kind of people who star in the great adventure that is The Promised Life really existed all over Europe. Even today, traces of it remain in the middle of the jungle. A college boy involved in the Independence Process finds, on the death of his grandfather, the diary his great-grandfather wrote when he was just a child and then a young man. We are in the twenties in libertarian Barcelona. A married couple of workers, both idealistic and utopian, decide to buy a piece of jungle in Brazil with the illusion of building a perfect country over and over again. A new Catalonia. The son is just eight years old when he begins that great adventure of which he will record in the diary. With a simplicity and tenderness that they grasp, the reader will love the illusions as hard as utopian of those losers. It is the historical moment in which the streets were baptized with names like Freedom, Universe, Fraternity, Equality..., the great moment of the anarchic and universalist ideals. Workers who spoke Esperanto, who were vegetarians, animalists... and who believed that with effort and dedication humanity could be perfect. Enric Larreula tells us that okay, the people who want to change the world are always great naive, stubborn, but they are also always the most generous. And they lose everything but hope. Their ideals always come back. Perhaps in this dramatic story the old ideals are reborn through the great-grandson, who discovers in astonishment how their struggles were already those of their ancestors?