The story is Enrique's, and, evidently, Rafael Yglesias's. Enrique's wife Margaret is dying of cancer, and the novel is structured to jump back and forth in time between her final weeks of life and other times, stretching backwards 30 years, during which they met, fell in love, and struggled. Yglesias writes with a sharp and unsparing insight into insecure Enrique, into himself, laying bare his immature and unfaithful love of youth and then later in time, contrastingly, the depth of love and devotion to Margaret that he recognizes as the essential truth of his life, and the profound pain, guilt, and bereavement he feels at losing her. Enrique and Margaret are both brought fully and wonderfully to life, characters created with all the authenticity seemingly transferred whole and without loss from their real-life models.

Essentially this a novel of loss, and so can be bleak. Straightaway Yglesias writes that "His ambition since last fall had been to lift a single grain of the tonnage of her grief at saying good-bye to life. Listening to her while the red- and orange-colored frozen fruit bars melted onto his blue jeans, he knew he would fail." (page 24... sure you want to keep reading?!). Enrique is a harsh self-critic who fears he cannot provide what is needed for Margaret and for their two young adult sons. "He dreaded the sorrow that lay ahead for his sons and feared he would be unable to console them. He soothed himself with the hope that a permanent deposit of those carefree hours playing on the hardwood floors with their mother - not a memory of happiness but an unremembered absorption of her joy at having created them - could provide a lifetime's buoyancy that would eventually lift his sons' hearts above the cruelty of losing her."

Alternating paragraphs that deal with the present with paragraphs that recount the past, in which Margaret and Enrique are young and full of life and in which death is an unconsidered far-off reality, balances the couple's ending with its beginning and provides moments of welcome amusement, as Yglesias pokes fun at his extraordinarily insecure, but with a patina of bravado, younger self. There is a yearlong affair Enrique has with a friend of Margaret's during an early portion of their marriage, a time during which he professed to feel like the marriage was a huge mistake, and that he did not love his wife and felt he never would. If there is anything murky in this novel, it is how he moved from those feelings to the deep and unmistakable love he clearly feels for her 20 years on. ( )

Enrique Sabas, guionista de cine, y su mujer, Margaret, diseñadora gráfica, tienen dos hijos y llevan una vida acomodada en Nueva York. Tras treinta años de matrimonio y alcanzada una estabilidad que parecía imposible, la pareja lleva tres años luchando contra el cáncer que ella padece y que ha entrado en fase terminal.
Margaret prepara su despedida de familiares y amigos ayudada por Enrique, quien durante estos últimos y extraños días va reconstruyendo la historia del matrimonio: la época en la que se conocieron, el desarrollo de sus vocaciones artísticas, el nacimiento de sus hijos, los altibajos de su relación… Los recuerdos de su vida en común y la intensidad de su despedida nos muestran la complejidad de una relación duradera.

If reading about dying bothers you, don't pick it up. If reading about insecure people bothers you, don't pick it up. If you want to read a good story about how a husband prepares himself and his family for his wife's death, and flashbacks to other times in their relationship, then you'll probably enjoy this story. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it. There are parts I thought were very slow and boring and frustrating. There were other parts that moved along quickly and were interesting. And there were parts that just made you want to curl up and cry. ( )

Emotional, amazingly frank, deliciously happy and gut-wrenchingly sad - and so good. I loved it! ( )

I would give this book 5 stars alone just on technical merit, emotional attachment, style, you name it. But the subject matter is SO HARD. If it hadn't been for Book Club, I would have never picked this up.
But I'm glad I did. And I'd like to read something ele by Yglesias, hopefully to balance this out.

So... to actually review this...

The story is of a marriage, and is told from the early days when they met, and the last days, when the wife, Margaret, is dying. It is interesting to observe through Enrique the maturation of love, the devotion they have to each other, body and soul, how that changes yet never really leaves. There are moments of passion, when they think they can do nothing but go forward with this love, and moments of decision, when they have to choose to commit and re-commit. There are so many moments of illumination, when you see what love comes down to for all of us: how simple are our needs, and yet how complicated meeting those needs becomes, until we look back and see the gifts we were given all along.

There is regret, of course. The story is told through Enrique, so we're not sure what Margaret might regret. And there is the torture of realizing there's not enough time to say it all, let alone do it all: even in a 29-year marriage, with partners who are blessed enough to be able to spend the last months by each other's sides, there still isn't enough time.

If you're up for the challenge, this is a great book. But you will be moved to tears, probably every chapter. ( )