La belleza debe morir

Annie Ernaux says in the last paragraph of Pure Passion that every woman must experience some at some point in her life, although passion is not chosen, it happens and breaks the seams of our own self. From that wave that rises and destroys everything, from the impossibility of building bridges when we are already loaded with the past, from the claustrophobia that causes heartbreak and from the windows that finally open, is this novel. The protagonist and narrator is a mature woman, a separated mother in her fifties and free in her sexuality, in her attitudes and in her affections who travels to Venice with her mother and tries to rebuild herself and her love story -already finished- with a married man and he does it by "writing" to the only person who was there: him. He is actually a mirage, an impossible and real dream like Venice itself that the author displays, dark and wintry, always uncertain.