The diary0% in

Martín Santomé

The office

The diary

At his ledgers in the downtown office, the widowed Martín marks the grey days toward a retirement he half-dreads, until the arrival of the young clerk Laura Avellaneda quietly changes everything. The dull accountancy office, with its routines and small hierarchies, is the ordinary Montevideo life against which the sudden late love flares.

The diary

inferredMartín Santomé keeps the books at a firm in downtown Montevideo, counting down to retirement; the office is invented and sited in the real business centre of the city.

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The courtship25% in

Laura Avellaneda

Avenida 18 de Julio

The courtship

Along the crowded 18 de Julio, over coffees and after-work walks, the reserved Martín and the young Laura slowly, disbelievingly fall in love. The ordinary avenue becomes the setting of an extraordinary reprieve, the city Martín has passed through unseeing for years suddenly lit by unexpected happiness.

The courtship

explicitThe main avenue of Montevideo, 18 de Julio, with its shops, cafés and cinemas, is the real thoroughfare along which Martín and Laura's courtship unfolds.

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The family50% in

Blanca

The Rambla

The family

On the Rambla by the wide brown river, Martín works through his relations with his grown children, among them the sympathetic Blanca, who alone guesses at his happiness. The open waterfront, the city's great shared space, is where the private diary opens briefly onto family and the wider life of Montevideo.

The family chapters

explicitThe Rambla, the long waterfront promenade of Montevideo along the Río de la Plata, is a real and central feature of the city where the characters walk and talk.

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Jaime

Martín's apartment

The family

In the family apartment, Martín's uneasy relations with his sons, and the secret of the withdrawn Jaime, run alongside his diary of the affair. When the truce ends in sudden loss, it is to this ordinary home and its griefs that Martín is returned, the reprieve over and the long grey resumed.

The family chapters

inferredMartín lives with his three grown children in an apartment in central Montevideo; the flat is invented and sited in the real residential districts near the city centre.

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The truce75% in

Laura Avellaneda

The rented room

The truce

In the rented room, their refuge from an office and a city that would not understand, Martín and Laura live the brief truce of the title, a happiness he knows is too good to last. The plain little room holds the whole fragile miracle of the book, ordinary walls around an extraordinary reprieve from loneliness.

The truce

inferredMartín rents a small room where he and Laura keep their affair; the room is invented and sited in the central Montevideo neighbourhoods of the diary.

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