“It is very different to understand the skin of words than to understand the heart that beats inside and that is captured with the experience that life gives you”
Josep Giralt, Sirio Sanguino

When Sirio Sanguino, the first book written by Josep Giralt and published by Editorial Gregal, fell into my hands, it seemed to me a strong and well-written book, worthy of a serious and responsible writer with his literature, which promised an interesting and entertaining story, and he did not let me down because that’s the way it was.

For some time I had not read a story like the one told by Josep Giralt in Sirio Sanguino. A story close by the authenticity of its language and fun, narrated in a plot that attracts the reader and seduces with a story that will not let it easily escape.

Josep Giralt tells us the personal story of Sirio Sanguino, a loving character for his impudence and freshness, which the reader may hate at certain moments for their unpleasant and unexpected reactions, but, which, however, are not disrespectful enough to that the reader stops feeling sympathy for the character, and prevents him from continuing to read the book.

Sirio Sanguino is a man from the regions, who suffer from the social stigma that signifies two relevant factors in a child: on the one hand, the child is repudiated by his mother in his childhood, the mother rejects him and this is finally educated by his maternal aunt; On the other hand, Sirio Sanguino lives the social stigma of being an orphan of a father. At various moments in history, an allusion is made to the social presence of death and its experience and acceptance in certain social environments with few economic resources such as that of the central character of the story.

Josep Giralt transports us through his words to a typical society of the 1950-1960 years of deep Spain, where the “what it will say” and the abysmal difference between social classes is the usual of the time. Josep Giralt gives us a masterful description of the atmosphere that the character lives, while in parallel, Sirio Sanguino grows as a character, matures and evolves as a person, leaving behind the mischievous and irreverent child who was to become an enterprising and ambitious adult who dreams to succeed in Madrid, presented as the great city where Sirio overturns his illusions, and where Sirio strives to make his dreams come true, from his dreams of prospering in love to working life, and where we discover Sirio as a young adult who with his traps and tricks, sorrows and joys, he struggles to move forward and survive in a life never easy for the exciting character created by Josep Giralt.

Sirio Sanguino is a fighter character, as were many people of his time, but who, like many people of the time, is also a victim of the “what they will say”, so common in those years, and that situation leads him to ignore factors of his life, which finally ends up discovering in a striking way in a final scene of the novel, in which through an intense and forceful dialogue, the writer Josep Giralt performs a magnificent narrative work when confronting Sirio Sanguino to his traumas deeper, to their most hated fears through an epic and apotheosis dialogue with the protagonist’s mother.
In short, I recommend reading this first novel by the writer for several good reasons, the main ones are that Josep Giralt with Sirio Sanguino gets a novel of superior literary quality, where the rich and studied language is surprising because of its authenticity, which is a reader does not accustomed to the forms and linguistic uses of a provincial town can come to surprise positively, besides that with its intense plot the novel entertains the reader and will enjoy it pleasantly with the reading.