Santander in the 1920s is a very fashionable place, thanks to its status as the summer resort of Alfonso XIII's court, but at the core of Santander's year-round society are Virginia Montes and her many cousins. Virginia, who jokingly compares herself to Jane Austen's Emma, is something of an enigma to her contemporaries: she seems to have declined any number of eligible bachelors. And now she is involved in an odd, not-quite-romantic friendship with the upwardly-mobile gynaecologist doctor Anselmo. Secretly, though, she is pining for the working-class boy she was in love with as a teenager, who has been killed in a pointless colonial war in Morocco.

Pombo — who grew up in Santander himself — follows Virginia's psychological development with an almost Proustian level of detail, as she wavers on the edge of falling in love with Anselmo (who sometimes seems more interested in her cousin Gabriel) and gets involved with a couple of shady spiritualists, the Bárcenas, who are clearly hoping to put her in touch with the deceased Casimiro. We, of course, know that the destruction of the clever and beautiful but sadly useless Virginia is going on in parallel with the Spanish political earthquakes that are about to render her kind of life and the whole society she lives in totally irrelevant, but those are happening out of our sight: the focus remains tightly on Virginia and her quasi-feudal household.

A slow, gentle, poignant but ultimately rather merciless book. Death is death, entropy increases, and consolations are illusory. ( )