Tobeyo o del amor

Tobeyo o del amor was the last work published while Juan Gil-Albert was alive, in 1990, although it was the late publication of a much earlier text, possibly begun in the early sixties of the last century. A work of obvious autobiographical content, it places its action in Mexico, a country where Claudio, the protagonist (a transcript of the author), arrives fleeing Spain after the end of the civil war, discovering a strange and distant country that ends up trapping him. The text recounts, in those early years of the 1940s, the obsessive love story between the exiled Claudio and Tobeyo, a young and beautiful local boy, a story based on an episode from the author's real life that would have constituted the experience intimate experience experienced by him during his exile. An emotional memory of the host country is also a vivid group portrait: the one formed by some exiled intellectuals, forced to flee their country after the fascist victory, while they relate to that foreign land and its inhabitants, offering us a realistic painting of the life, concerns, passions and interests of those members of the republican cultural elite, forced to live the uprooting of exile under economic hardships. A beautiful and complex, poetic work, at the level of the best prose of its author, which surely due to his high autobiographical content, was kept by him until almost the end of his life. After a single edition in 1990, it had never been published again. Amistades Particulares rescues, 33 years later, this little jewel of Spanish literature, transcendental not only for its quality, but also for the frankness with which the author addresses the matter of his homosexuality.