Description: "A lyrical novel following an idealistic student who explores the power of literature in Franco's Spain. It's the summer of 1963 and Leâon Egea, a cocky nineteen-year-old student and aspiring author, has just finished his first year studying literature at the University of Granada and is starting a summer job as an encyclopedia salesman. Leâon, infuriated by the injustices in Spanish society under the Franco dictatorship, comes to find that literature can speak the truth when the reality is clouded. In this coming-of-age novel by renowned Spanish writer Luis Garcâia Montero, Leâon discovers that, under the repressive Franco dictatorship, people, places, and events are not always what they seem. But literature, words, and names open paths to discovery, both personal and political. Through lyrical fast-paced narrative, Someone Speaks Your Name explores literature as a foundation for understanding human relationships, national character, discrete differences between right and wrong, and for pursuing the path forward. As Leâon's professor tells him: "Learning to write is learning to see.""--
Brief description: Luis García Montero is a Spanish writer whose work includes poetry, novels, essays, song lyrics, and literary scholarship. He spearheaded a literary movement in Spain known as the Poetry of Experience and is head of Spain's Instituto Cervantes.
Review Quotes: "A furtive individual traverses these pages. . . . We don't know who he is, but each time we read the book, when we open it randomly or search among its pages for favorite lines, we encounter him, a blurred but undeniable presence. He crosses paths with us, readers and visitors to this book. He is like someone who walks by on the street and is captured in the photos of others, an eternal stranger who ends up becoming familiar. He survives by calibrating each day, as if administering medicine, the right dose of tenderness and sarcasm, and if he conjures up temerity, he calculates, at the same time, its return."--Antonio Muñoz Molina, author of Sepharad, translated by Edith Grossman