In a Nutshell:

Dime Quién Soy or Tell Me Who I am in English, is the story of Amelia Garagoya, the great-grandmother of the narrator. The narrator is a journalist, who lacks any ambition and is asked by his aunt to go and research the life of his great-grandmother and write a book on her life. The book goes back and forth in time, it goes back to the Spanish Civil War, to the Cold War era and then back to the modern day. Each section of the book, (there are 5 sections in total) is headed by the name of a man, a man who meant a great deal to Amelia Garagoya.  The Narrator has the huge task of taking the jigsaw puzzle pieces of his great-grandmother’s life and putting them together to get a sense of who Amelia Garagoya was.

Observations:

I bought this book when I was still working in London as a Spanish Teacher, I read it in Spanish. I  used to love spending hours poring over the Spanish Literature books in Foyles on Charing Cross Road.

At 1097 pages, it is a tome of a book. I stopped and started it, I took it to Japan on honeymoon and almost gave up on it but thanks to my husband’s encouragement, I brought it home with me and finished it. It took me a year from buying it to finishing it, which is rare for me.

Themes:

It is a fantastic epic tale of love, identity, politics, family and memory.

A Quote:

“Me quedé sin saber qué decir. La bisabuela era tema tabú en la familia. No se hablaba de ella; y mis primos y yo apenas habíamos logrado saber algo del misterioso personaje, de quien estaba prohibido preguntar y de quien no existía ni una sola fotografía.”

“I was left not knowing what to say. Our great-grandmother was a taboo subject in our family. There was no talk of her; and my cousins ​​and I had barely managed to find out anything about this mysterious character, of whom it was forbidden to ask questions and of whom not a single photograph existed.”

Book Details

Publisher: Grupo Books

Publishing Date: 05.01.2021

Author: Julia Navarro

Julia Navarro is a journalist, political analyst, and the internationally bestselling author of six novels, including Story of a Sociopath, The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud and The Bible of Clay. Her fiction has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in Madrid.

Translator: James Womack

James Womack teaches Spanish and Russian translation at Cambridge University. He has published three collections of poems, most recently Homunculus (2020), as well as versions of Mayakovsky, Tvardovsky and Manuel Vilas.

A bit about me!

A bit about me, my name is Jess Andoh-Thayre. I am from Brixton, South London. I currently live in Cambodia. Before living here in Cambodia, I lived in Tanzania with my husband, who is a diplomat. I have also lived in Chile and Spain. I am a French, Spanish and English as an Additional Language (EAL) teacher. I recently qualified as a SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator). After taking three years off to have a baby in a pandemic and also retrain, I have just returned to work as an Elementary Learning Support Teacher.