Sometimes, when I finish a book, I feel a pressing need to talk about it. I’m not trying to explain its plot but rather to recount what it made me feel, why it moved me, and how much I enjoyed it. It doesn’t happen every time. Perhaps that is why, when it does happen, it deserves to be said. With the latest novel by the writer Mayte Uceda (Siero, Asturias, 1967), titled Los amores paralelos, I have felt it again.
My reading, in addition, carries personal dimensions: I am a native of Oviedo and grew up hearing stories about the everyday life of my parents and sisters in a bourgeois, Catholic, provincial Oviedo. Later, my profession as a Mining Engineering Technician allowed me to see firsthand how earlier generations of miners had lived through those dark years of exploitation and the lack of workers’ rights.
Unintentionally, I am a witness to the diverse points of view that were narrated to me and to the knowledge gained from studying the sociolaboral history of mining in Asturias. All of this helped me understand the motivations that inexorably led to a dramatic confrontation.
Uceda transports us to the Asturias of the early thirties, a land where social differences could be felt. It was enough to cover the few kilometers that separated Oviedo from the mining basins to encounter two universes close on the map and yet separated by an immense distance.
The author builds, around a love story, a portrait of a society brimming with conflicts: parents and children, men and women, bourgeois and proletarians, workers and employers, priests and atheists; those who align to pull in two opposite directions: those who want to preserve their world and those who aspire to transform it.
Estefanía and Selina are the daughters of a well-to-do Oviedo family. Their father is a renowned artist of religious iconography; both have been raised within the values of an elitist, religious society. The circumstances lead them to fall in love with two men belonging to opposing worlds. One with a sergeant of the Civil Guard who ultimately is stationed at Sama de Langreo, the capital of the council responsible for the main coal basin. The other beloved is a young miner who lives in a Langreo town.
Two sisters; two men; two social environments; two ways of looking at the same reality, and on the horizon an inexorable tragedy.
The Black Coal of Asturias
The novel succeeds in reconstructing that dirty, dangerous, ungrateful land that compels its men and women to toil themselves into a life of meager subsistence. The mine was never just about pulling coal. Around every shaft, headframe, and excavation, a complete society was built—homes, canteens, schools, taverns, unions, guards, politics, slums—and, above all, families whose lives were conditioned by what happened in the deep, dark heart of the earth, hundreds of meters from the sunlight.
The coal permeated the skin, the lungs, the houses, the clothes, the villages, the labor relations and politics. The presence of grisú, collapses, explosions, accidents, and job-related illnesses lived side by side with the miners, who were often trapped by wages that barely kept them afloat. Being the child of a miner meant, with few exceptions, entering the mine to work. Being a miner’s wife meant living daily with the fear that the man who left to work at dawn might not return.
The author has a deep grasp of that world. She does not merely document it: she makes it credible. The reader senses the subterranean labor, the fear, the solidarity, and also the resentment that such harsh living conditions could accumulate.
The other universe, that of the provincial capital, is also very well realized. Oviedo possessed social codes that were markedly different: appearances, convenient marriages, economic status, and the place one held in a society stratified by ruling classes.
There was no need to draw borders: they existed in education, clothing, housing, surnames, opportunities, and even in the way people spoke. And yet, Mayte Uceda condemns both worlds to meet. There is a chapter charged with emotion, tension, and dialectical debate that unfolds in the dining room of the sculptor’s family home, where the miner’s family and the bourgeois family come together to meet. In this scene the writer shines and demonstrates her mastery of the way of thinking and living of both families. The dialogues reveal the vital distance that separates them and turn that conversation into a courtroom speech of the class struggle that marked the first half of the twentieth century.
The comfortable Oviedo needed the coal and the wealth of the basins; while, the working class watched as the center of power exploited them just a few kilometers away.
In this context, the religious images in the family crafts workshop represent one world; the mine represents the other. Between incense and dynamite there was more distance than the kilometers themselves.
The novel traverses the fall of Alfonso XIII, the arrival of the Second Republic, and the gestation, development, and brutal repression by the army under the orders of the central government of the October 1934 Revolution in Asturias.
Social inequalities, political radicalization, and worker conflict raised walls that became increasingly difficult to cross. There were ruling classes unable to understand the needs of those who worked for them; political and union leaders who used the miners as instruments and weapons in an ideological fight. Among them were people who simply wished to bring home a wage to feed, clothe, educate, and warm their families.
The author introduces the Revolution inside the homes
And then History changes. Revolutions can be explained by dates and documents, but those who live them have names, parents, children, siblings, enemies, wives, and lovers. Social conflicts become familial and loyalties clash with one another. The protagonists must decide to whom they belong: to their family, to their class, to their union, to their principles, or to the people they love. And they cannot have it all; they must choose.
The characters in Los amores paralelos respond with mindsets recognizable to the era without turning into mere representatives of a single class. They love, hate, envy, are generous, supportive, selfish, brave or cowardly. Especially apt is the treatment of women, their familial and economic dependence, their vulnerability, and a violence that the author shows from within the mentalities of that society, without judging it from our present.
And suddenly, October 1934 arrives
The miners, desperate and hopeless, take up arms and aim to build a proletarian commune that would allow them to be equals. The uprising spreads like a trail of gunpowder through the Basins and reaches Oviedo. Uceda places her protagonists in both trenches and accurately portrays the confrontation. The military intervention ordered by the Republic’s government succeeds in thwarting the Revolution. The repression unleashed against the insurgents is brutal. Thousands are killed, injured, detained, or punished; buildings are destroyed and society becomes even more divided. When the gunfire ceased, the smoke of the dynamite subsided, the ruins appeared, and something even worse: a pernicious hatred took root in people.
Much more than documentation and narrative
I must admire the enormous amount of research that sustains the novel, even though its achievement goes beyond simply recounting events: it reconstructs a whole society; its way of living, working, relating, loving, obeying, rebelling, believing, and even hating. Its social, labor, and political vision allows one to understand—without needing to justify it—how that breeding ground of inequality, frustration, and confrontation could form. Everything feels credible because, beyond the landscape, Uceda manages to recreate the character of both worlds.
The circular structure, the short chapters give the novel a brisk and sometimes vibrant pace. Its protagonists are fictional, but they move among real events, people, and places. Fiction allows you to penetrate places where historical chronicles often fall short.
And they did not inherit the land
Perhaps that is what stayed with me after closing the book: the fate of thousands of landless people. Men who work hundreds of meters below the surface, extracting their wealth from the earth and learning that it will never belong to them.
Millions of Spaniards reached adulthood in one of the harshest periods of our recent history. They wanted to love, start a family, prosper, or simply live, but they grew up in a time that offered very few opportunities. First came injustices and inequalities. That was followed by social tensions. Then revolutions. Later wars. Asturias, Spain, Europe, and much of the world ended up in a vast conflagration.
Perhaps that is why, when I closed Los amores paralelos, I did not feel I was leaving only fictional characters behind. I recognized the mine, I recognized Oviedo, and above all, I had recognized the people.
For a few hours, Mayte Uceda made me believe I had witnessed everything she recounts. And when a novel conveys that to me, as I’ve said before, I feel compelled to tell it and to congratulate the author for such a magnificent story.
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Author: Mayte Uceda. Title: Los amores paralelos. Publisher: Planeta. Sales: Todos tus libros.