Learning to Lose: A Novel - Softcover

David Trueba was born in Madrid in 1969 and has been successful both as a novelist and as a screenwriter. La buena vida was his widely acclaimed debut as a film director and was followed by Obra maestra, Soldados de Salamina, Bienvenido a casa, and La silla de Fernando. He is the author of two previous novels, Cuatro amigos and Abierto toda la noche. Learning to Lose won the Critics Award in 2009 and marks Trueba’s English-language debut.

Mara Faye Lethem is the translator of Spanish and Catalan authors such as
Albert Sánchez Piñol, Juan Marsé, Javier Calvo, Jorge Semprún, and Pablo DeSantis. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she has lived in Barcelona since 2003.

Aurora broke her hip in a completely unspectacular way. Getting out of the bathtub, she lifted her leg over the edge and suddenly heard a small crunch. She felt a slight shiver and her legs turned rubbery. She fell slowly, with time to brush the tips of her fingers along the wall tiles and prepare for the impact. Her elbow hit the fixtures causing a cold pain and a second later she was lying down, naked and overcome, on the still-damp bottom of the bathtub. Papá, she wanted to shout, but her voice came out weak. She tried to raise her voice, but the best she could do was emit a repetitive, well spaced out lament.
   Papá...Papá...Papá.
The murmur reaches the little back room, where Leandro is reading the
newspaper. His first reaction is to think that his wife is calling him for another
one of her ridiculous requests, for him to get down a jar of spices that’s on too
high a shelf, to ask him something silly. So he answers with an apathetic what?
that gets no reply. He leisurely closes the newspaper and stands up. Later he will
be ashamed of the irritation he feels at having to stop reading. It’s always the
same, he sits down to read and she talks to him over the radio or the ringing
telephone. Or the doorbell sounds and she asks, can you get it? when he
already has the intercom receiver in his hand. He goes down the hallway until
he identifies where the monotonous call is coming from. There is no urgency in
Aurora’s voice. Perhaps fatalism. When he opens the bathroom door and finds
his fallen wife he thinks that she’s sick, dizzy. He looks for blood, vomit, but all
he sees is the white of the bathtub and her naked skin like a glaze.