Sharing life and wounds in a hospital room

Blanca Busquets (Barcelona, ​​​​1961) proposes to Shared rooms A seemingly unassuming novel that operates with considerable emotional ambition: to explore what happens when lives and wounds overlap in intimate, physical, and symbolic spaces. The title is not merely a scenic reference, but a poetic and moral statement: sharing a room means acknowledging the presence of the other, but also exposing oneself, negotiating silences, and redefining boundaries. In fact, there are two rooms that play a central role on the trauma ward of the hospital where the story unfolds: 271, where Montserrat is, and 269, where Riqui lies. At first, when they pass each other in the corridor, they both think they know each other, but they can't place them. The mystery is set, and at this point, the novel takes on a subtle, almost comical, edge. thriller.

Montserrat is a retired bookseller recovering from cranial surgery and hip replacement; she has a daughter named Susanna. Riqui, in his forties, husband of Natalia and father of Pol, is immobilized after a serious fall that broke his legs and several vertebrae. Both characters grapple with their own past and that of others, and this overlapping experience creates discomfort, but also a form of recognition. Busquets demonstrates that proximity can be both a refuge and a threat, and that the desire to care often coexists with the fear of being absorbed. The problem is that the characters' registers, tones, and language are too similar, and they could have been much more distinct despite their shared love of books.

Busquets opts for a clear, unadorned style, relying on the smallest gesture. It's prose that doesn't seek to show off, but rather to support the characters, to accompany them. This restraint proves effective in a novel that speaks of vulnerabilities, of grief simmering since childhood, and of nameless bonds. There are no major plot twists or narrative flourishes, but rather an accumulation of moments, of small revelations, that ultimately paint a dense emotional map: Riqui's absent father, for example, an abuser who spent everything on drugs while his mother cleaned floors, or Montserrat's friend, Núria. The author manages to construct this entire mosaic in a narrative that begins on a Tuesday and ends the following Tuesday.

To make one feel the weight of time

Shared rooms The novel unfolds at a leisurely, almost breathless pace, through two interior monologues of the two first-person narrators that converge in the same present. This tempo may disconcert readers accustomed to more tense plots, but it is consistent with the novel's intention: to make the reader feel the weight of time, the way in which real changes are rarely sudden. Perhaps the book's risk lies in this commitment to subtlety. There are moments when the narrative seems to hold back too much, and others when it unnecessarily prolongs itself with the reconstruction of the narrators' childhood and youthful ghosts, as if the setting (and the solitude) were prompting reminiscence. Busquets has written a well-crafted novel that carefully manages the mystery and speaks of an intimacy without stridency, a story that understands literature as a space for listening and that doesn't offer definitive answers, but rather a reading experience that engages the reader from the everyday and from restrained emotion. It confirms the author's ability to narrate what often remains out of focus: the gray areas of relationships, the weight of traumas, what we share without knowing what we give up or gain.