An indecent recollection

the long version

An Indecent Recollection is set in Barcelona in the winter of 1927, during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. But the story soon distances itself from these particularities of time and place. It relates the mad and despairing love of a man for a woman who will not be approached otherwise than by way of a curious ritual that while assuring her sexual satisfaction, rigorously refuses his to him. It is a love story of mad love and of exalted distress, of destruction and self-destruction, full of intransigence, told in three-part counterpoint through the voices of the lovers, Didac Cabanillas and the superb Elena Berrocal, and by the narrator Blas, in whom the other two have confided.