Trapped in paradise
Author and Manhattan Beach native Daniel Riley. Photo courtesy Daniel Riley “Barcelona Days” follows four Americans stranded abroad. Image courtesy Daniel Riley In the penultimate chapter of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” the newspaper reporter George Willard is preparing to leave the village where he grew up for the big city. He spends the day walking through the county fair, alone amid the crowd and increasingly conscious of the stakes of getting older. He has reached that fleeting, floating moment in every person’s journey when “for the first time he takes the backward view of life,” and feels what Anderson calls “the sadness of sophistication.” “Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure,” Anderson writes. The peculiar way that anxiety over life’s vast possibilities sharpens in moments of confinement or hemmed-in choices shapes Daniel Riley’s novel “Barcelona Days,” which…
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