From a very young age he wanted to be a writer, but the vicissitudes of life had prevented it. Together with his brother and another partner, he founded an office in Barcelona that provided him with financial stability.īut the true victory sought by Falcones was yet to come. The sacrifice was worth it: he graduated as a lawyer and had a very successful legal career.

However, soon after he found work in a bingo hall. The family tragedy forced him to seek employment in order to pay for his university studies. However, the sudden death of his father forced him to abandon sports practice.

This, when he got first place in the junior national equestrian championship in Salto. Falcones, the protagonistīorn in Barcelona (1959), Falcones' “heroic” journey begins at the age of 17. It is also Falcones' favorite storytelling method. It is also a common narrative scheme in literature, film, and the performing arts. A valid postulate, to some extent, to be taken as a more elaborate 'version' of Aristotle's premise in his Poetics. A formula described by film script specialist Robert McKee in his book The script (1997)īroadly speaking, this is the typical path traveled by all the protagonists in a film. It is a narrative structure proposed by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell in his book The hero with a thousand faces (1949). The life of Ildefonso Falcones seems to comply with the theory of 'The Hero's Journey'. Ildefonso Falcones and 'The Hero's Journey'

8 The parallel plot (or the 'real' story).

1 Ildefonso Falcones and 'The Hero's Journey'.

Through the construction of the Santa Maria del Mar church, located in the tradesman and fisherman’s neighbourhood of La Ribera, the ‘Cathedral of the Sea’ portrays the successful life of Arnau, a man who was once a servant boy in the countryside and to whom the city offers the opportunity to become a free citizen. The book sold seven million copies, was published in 40 countries, and led to Falcones’ winning the Italian literary prize Giovanni Boccaccio for best foreign author in 2007 and the Fulbert de Chartres French literary prize in 2009. The author rose to fame thanks to his best selling ‘Cathedral of the Sea’, a historical novel set in medieval Barcelona, his home town.

The book, which will be on sale at the same time in Spain, Latin America and the United States, is about the friendship, passion and revenge between two women from Madrid and Seville in the 18 th century, and is a call to freedom. Barcelona (ACN) - Ildefonso Falcones, a lawyer by profession who became an internationally acclaimed writer in 2006 thanks to his best-selling debut ‘Cathedral of the Sea’, set in medieval Barcelona, will publish his third novel ‘La reina descalza’ on the 21 st of February.

Books by ildefonso falcones