The Bosses
Original title: Las jefas
A fierce and addictive comedy set in a Costa Blanca resort that unfolds into a sentimental and criminal odyssey.
Villajoyosa, Alicante province. In the heart of a jungle of vegetation that has been imported from Southeast Asia stands Zen Gardens, a luxurious, excessive, decadent resort. High season is over, and now its fake villas and cardboard gardens house only a few guests, clients who have practically made the resort into their permanent residence.
Among them are Romana Romano and the Gran and Petit Navarro sisters, professional heiresses and spendthrifts by birth who haven't set foot outside the resort in six weeks. They don't work, they don't make plans, and their routine is reduced to playing cards, languishing by the pool, and downing strange cocktails.
Meanwhile, the hotel's handyman Primo is also trapped in his own loop, longing to get out of there but lacking the means to do so. His life and the girls' lives are about to collide.
Zen Gardens is almost a kind of tacky, sticky Overlook Hotel, inhabited by eccentric characters who move around like ghosts. Everyone seems to want to leave, but no one seems to know how.
Las jefas is a tale of unsettling stillness and stale atmospheres; a novel that oozes with holiday ennui and luxury as a sport in which a certain sordidness peeks out from beneath the streaks of makeup melted by the Levante sun. It's another example of Esther García Llovet's singular, fresh, and ironic voice, as she once again constructs a universe of distinctly Spanish, dreamlike, and hyper-realistic flavors, concluding her hallucinatory Eastern European Trilogy after the cult novels Spanish Beauty and Los guapos.
“Her texts aren’t merely novels: they’re poetry, film scripts, fragments of lives that readers will have to reconstruct as they read. A kind of writing that demands more than just passive reading.” — Marta Marné, El Periódico
A fierce and addictive comedy set in a Costa Blanca resort that unfolds into a sentimental and criminal odyssey.
Villajoyosa, Alicante province. In the heart of a jungle of vegetation that has been imported from Southeast Asia stands Zen Gardens, a luxurious, excessive, decadent resort. High season is over, and now its fake villas and cardboard gardens house only a few guests, clients who have practically made the resort into their permanent residence.
Among them are Romana Romano and the Gran and Petit Navarro sisters, professional heiresses and spendthrifts by birth who haven't set foot outside the resort in six weeks. They don't work, they don't make plans, and their routine is reduced to playing cards, languishing by the pool, and downing strange cocktails.
Meanwhile, the hotel's handyman Primo is also trapped in his own loop, longing to get out of there but lacking the means to do so. His life and the girls' lives are about to collide.
Zen Gardens is almost a kind of tacky, sticky Overlook Hotel, inhabited by eccentric characters who move around like ghosts. Everyone seems to want to leave, but no one seems to know how.
Las jefas is a tale of unsettling stillness and stale atmospheres; a novel that oozes with holiday ennui and luxury as a sport in which a certain sordidness peeks out from beneath the streaks of makeup melted by the Levante sun. It's another example of Esther García Llovet's singular, fresh, and ironic voice, as she once again constructs a universe of distinctly Spanish, dreamlike, and hyper-realistic flavors, concluding her hallucinatory Eastern European Trilogy after the cult novels Spanish Beauty and Los guapos.
“Her texts aren’t merely novels: they’re poetry, film scripts, fragments of lives that readers will have to reconstruct as they read. A kind of writing that demands more than just passive reading.” — Marta Marné, El Periódico
