Private Life

Vida Privada is a novel that draws a unique journey through Barcelona’s high and low society, their sitting rooms, their board rooms and their brothels. It has been considered the iconic novel of Barcelona. The main characters are the Lloberola family, a family of the most respected Barcelona’s bourgeoisie, who after years of economic prosperity live in a time of decline, watching how the family wealth melts in the hands of its younger siblings. This process of social and moral degradation is observed with a relentless irony. Sagarra divides the text into two parts, each with a theme and a predominant social sector. The initial part, chronicle of a social shipwreck, narrates the sinking of the Marqués de Sitjar
and the inability for the life of his two children. The author brings together very intelligently two major themes: sex and money. This pairing is the key that enables the merge between the two groups involved: the traditional nobility, loaded with debts and securities, and the new aristocracy, hungry for money and position.