3.5 out of 5 stars
A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.
The seven deadly sins are a list of vices within Christian teachings and currently are; lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath and envy. I say currently as the order has been different in the past, as well as having others included in the list in the early church, where they had nine at one point!
But what is the modern take on these vices? To answer that seven of the most exciting, vibrant voices in Catalan literature, Raül Garrigasait, Jordi Graupera, Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà, Marina Porras, Anna Punsoda, Adrià Pujol, and Oriol Quintana have been asked to chose one and write about it in any way they like.
It makes for a wide-ranging and interesting series of essays too, with subjects covered as diverse as relationships with others at the age of 14, a lesson learnt about pride at a delicatessen and a young girl first learning about lust, when a neighbour left his wife for a Russian girl thirty years younger than him.
I really enjoyed reading these. Each author has a vice they have chosen to write about and this makes them all very different in terms of the context, specific subjects and even if they think it is a vice or not. I didn’t really have a favourite and they all complement each other so well. As an aside, I think that the translator has done a great job too, finding the individual voices and making a cohesive book.
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