La Sonrisa de la Tierra by Ramón Villeró

Andorra is a tiny, tiny country between France and Spain that I have always wanted to visit just because it seems so weird and mythical. There’s not a lot of literature from Andorra though – one readily available book, The Pyramids of Cheops, is what most other people looking for Andorran literature seem to be reading, but I decided on something else: a short novel called La Sonrisa de la Tierra (The Smile of the Earth) that was translated into German and is available in paperback as well as ebook.

The book tells the story of Nader, who emigrates from the African desert (unspecified) to France. Nader’s first-person narrative has a touch of philosophy, but the kind that seems like swooning over the great thoughts you had over breakfast like “nobody wants to live in a war zone”. I got the feeling that the author really wanted to pen down his world view of “we should all get along and be nice to each other” (which I totally agree with, by the way), but the fictionalization of this didn’t really work for me.

Title of German translation: Das Lächeln der Erde
La Sonrisa de la Tierra by Ramón Villeró on Goodreads