TBTS Reviews: Learning To Lose
Spanish author David Trueba’s English-language debut, Learning to Lose is a loose-braided story of a loosely-knit family. Each generation is wrapped in its own private drama: sixteen-year-old Sylvia, on the cusp of sexual awakening; her father Lorenzo, who has just murdered his former best friend and business partner; her grandfather Leandro, who begins an affair with a Nigerian prostitute while his wife is dying of cancer. Sylvia’s destiny quite literally collides with that of Ariel, a twenty-year-old soccer player from Argentina who has just arrived in Madrid as the new potential superstar, when Ariel runs over her in the street and breaks her leg, then visits her, secretly, in the hospital after slipping away from his minders on the team.
At this point, you would be forgiven for rolling your eyes at the plot. In the hands of a bad writer, this would indeed be the stuff of high melodrama. But I am pleased to report that David Trueba is anything but a bad writer. Observe:
Desire works like the wind. Without any apparent effort. If it finds our sails extended, it will drag us at a dizzying speed. If our doors and shutters are closed, it bangs at the door for a while, searching for cracks or slots it can slip through. The desire attached to an object of desire binds us to it. But there is another kind of desire, abstract, disconcerting, that envelops us like a mood. It declares that we are ready for desire and that we just have to wait, our sails unfurled, for the wind to blow. That is the desire to desire.
Sylvia is sitting in the back of the classroom, in the row by the window, in the penultimate seat. The only kid behind her is Rainbow, a Colombian kid who’s wearing the official tracksuit of the Spanish national soccer team and dozing through the day’s classes. Sylvia turns sixteen on Sunday. She seems older, rising above her classmates with her detached attitude. Those same classmates whom she now watches as they study.
No, it’s not any of these. None of these mouths is the mouth I want brushing against my mouth. I don’t want any of these tongues tangled in mine. Nobody here has the teeth that are going to nibble on my lower lip, my earlobe, the bend of my neck, the fold of my stomach. Nobody here.
Nobody.
Trueba lets his plot unfold leisurely. Stretching over six hundred pages, Learning to Lose would seem in danger of turning into a sprawling mess. But it is precisely in this measured pace where Trueba’s strength can be seen. Ariel’s interest in Sylvia develops naturally; they are not forced together by an impatient author straining against a self-imposed limit. Lorenzo’s dread of exposure makes each visit from the police a torment. Grief-stricken, irrational Leandro descends inexorably into iniquity, moving the reader to pity rather than scorn.
There’s a lot going on in this novel. It’s an immigrant story, three times over; besides Ariel, the suddenly wealthy, welcomed outsider from a poorer country, there is Osembe, the Nigerian prostitute who keeps herself as opaque as she can from Leandro, and also Daniela, the highly religious Ecuadoran domestic worker whom Lorenzo falls for even as his world threatens to collapse around him, each one a beautifully rendered variation on the theme. It’s a coming of age story, and also a coming of old-age story as Leandro clutches at the fraying threads of life as he watches his wife deteriorate. It’s a family chronicle, but Trueba chooses not to let the stories bleed over one another, instead keeping each family member’s story distinct in that the members of Sylvia’s family have only the faintest notion what the others are going through. There is a sense of distance between members of the family that rings far truer than if the characters leaned on each other for support.
Learning to Lose is a highly emotional novel, not to mention, as the quoted passage suggests, a powerfully sexy one, but Trueba never resorts to manipulation. His touch is light and deft; he makes his moves exactly where he needs to, allowing but not commanding the reader to feel with the characters. It is a sad book, but not a bitter one. It is full of love and fear and hate and need, presented in increasingly complex, sophisticated ways. It is, above all else, a wise book, satisfying in every way at the end, especially in the resolution of the story of Sylvia and Ariel. Few chroniclers of the human heart in conflict with itself, to borrow Faulkner’s phrase, are more adept or more accurate.
Learning to Lose, David Trueba, Other Press, $16.95, trade paperback.
