La casa de los hilos rotos – The House of Thorn Threads
The House of Thorn Threads is a novel based on the life of the artist and textile designer Otti Berger, an important figure in the revolutionary German Bauhaus art school, who, like many of the women of her time, was in some way silenced by history. The text is intended as a tribute to her work. Woman, communist, of Jewish descent, with a fascinating artistic, professional and emotional career, Berger was a victim of History in capital letters.
Otti’s past is interwoven in the novel with the present-day story of Montserrat Ribó and her daughter Penélope. It is she who discovers the secret diaries of her great-grandmother Mercè Ribó in the family farmhouse in Girona, an event that will completely change her life and that of the rest of the family. Line after line of the diary, Penélope weaves together the unique relationship between Otti and Mercé, two women who joined their lives in a turbulent time, when barbarism was beginning to sharpen its claws. Penelope will discover that her great-grandmother Mercè Ribó, an upper-class Barcelonian with a passion for art and the Bauhaus movement, travelled to Dessau to fulfil her dream, where she met the enigmatic Otti Berger, from whom she would not be separated until the outbreak of the civil war in Spain. Sometime later, fate would once again bond them together in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The House of Thorn Threads is a hymn to freedom, to friendship, to art, to love, to the memory of all those forgotten women. Broken threads that are reborn in these pages so that the reader can walk again through their lives.
An excellent novel for its setting and its characters, masterfully drawn. 𝘓𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘢 𝘥𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘴 𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴 𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘴 is an earnest, committed and very well written novel. You could say it is flawless. A must read
Recreated with detail and a carefully chosen setting, Morales has taken special care to transmit a very rich physicality, the description of the fabrics, the wefts and the brightly coloured warps are is so accurate that it almost seems as if you can touch them
A hymn to freedom, to art and to the memory of all forgotten women
Through a lyrical story, full of details and almost poetic, she takes us to Germany between the wars, turning the novel into a document with interesting historical references