The Faint-hearted Bolshevik

Short-listed for one of the most prestigious literary awards in Spain before being made into a successful film, The Faint-hearted Bolshevik has, over the fifteen years since its first edition, become an undisputed classic of contemporary Spanish literature.

One morning in a traffic jam on his way to work, a driver is distracted and slams into the car in front. When the woman driving the other car reacts with a torrent of abuse out of all proportion to the incident, the driver cracks and decides to teach her a lesson, by dedicating his whole summer to ruining this foul woman’s life. But his plans for revenge are thrown by the sudden appearance of Rosana, his intended victim’s compelling teenage sister, and he finds himself and his base instincts severely tested…

Caught up in this impossible affair, the man’s thoughts turn in moments of weakness to that famous photo of the last Tsar’s daughters, as he tries to put himself in the place of the Bolshevik hired to kill the beautiful Grand Duchess Olga; a man who was surely, just like him, a victim of his own faint-heartedness.

So, within a story somewhere between comedy, suspense and melodrama, Lorenzo Silva uses his main character to present a vicious critique of today’s world of work, and the inner conflicts of a frustrated middle-aged man, which is at the same time a story of ill-fated love with an unexpected twist.