El extraño viaje: Salvador Espinosa’s Novel of a Stolen Identity and a Second Chance in Ferrol
An orphaned boy, caught up in drug trafficking and under threat of death, flees to Galicia by hitchhiking. Another young man of the same age gives him a lift towards A Coruña. On this short drive of about two hours, Mauricio and Pablo get talking and decide to take turns at the wheel.
Author: Salvador Espinosa González-Llanos
Title: El extraño viaje (2001)
Format: Spanish paperback (Embora), 152 pages
Scope: Contemporary novel set in Galicia
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/8495460076 (ASIN 8495460076)
The Accident
First Mauricio sleeps and then, after a stop for coffee, Pablo will hand over the wheel and rest so he can go to work refreshed the next day. Mauricio, agitated by the mess he is in, manages to fall asleep and wakes up tormented, thinking the Colombians chasing him have found him. After the fright, he realises it was only a nightmare. After a long while they stop by the road, and Mauricio takes the wheel so that Pablo can rest. Then everything becomes confused: there is a car crash. The driver is seriously injured and his passenger dies.
A Stroke of Luck
Mauricio wakes up in hospital and vaguely remembers how he ended up there. According to the doctor and the nurse looking after him, he has been in a coma for about three months, and he has difficulty speaking and moving his legs. Then comes the stroke of luck: Mauricio realises that for three months everyone has taken him for Pablo. Remembering his dark past, and still struggling to speak, he decides to leave things as they are and does not reveal his true identity. That way he is no longer a problem for the Colombians, who think he died in the accident.
The new Pablo begins his rehabilitation in hospital, with the help of two great-aunts who had not seen Pablo since he was five and a devoted nurse.
Galicia and the Drug Trade
Mauricio’s flight to Galicia is not a random choice of setting. In the 1980s and 1990s the Galician coast, with its countless inlets and its tradition of tobacco smuggling, became one of the main entry points for South American cocaine into Europe, and Colombian cartels worked with local clans. The police operation known as Operación Nécora in 1990 brought the issue into the open, and the journalist Nacho Carretero later told the story in Fariña (2015), adapted for television in 2018. The novel’s background of danger and debts owed to traffickers draws on that reality.
A Second Chance
The book’s central idea, a young man who wakes from a coma into a life that is not quite his own and decides to make the most of it, belongs to a long literary tradition of stolen or borrowed identities, from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley to many modern thrillers. Espinosa uses it not for suspense but for a story of redemption: what begins as opportunism, as Mauricio thinks only of compensation, gradually becomes a chance to change. His work among cancer patients in Ferrol is what transforms him.
Who Is It For?
It is a short, easy-to-read novel, well suited to intermediate learners of Spanish and to readers who enjoy stories about second chances.
A New Life in Ferrol
This second chance is a relief, and after more than a month in hospital he decides to go to Ferrol, where Pablo worked, to take up his job as a hospital porter. There he works in the oncology department. At first his only interest is collecting the compensation for the accident, but little by little his way of seeing things changes. The new Pablo becomes a light in the darkness, an unconditional support for many patients. It is a strange journey full of mixed emotions and memories of a past that no longer belongs to him. I have not found an English edition, so I link the Spanish one.
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