This time, to talk about myself, I thought: if we could open people up, we’d find landscapes. If anyone were to open me up, they’d find beaches. Agnès Varda, Les Plages d’Agnès (Agnès’s Beaches), 2008.

That quote, used as an epigraph, introduces the author’s approach: Talking about himself and others through the prism of beaches. Beaches of the present and the past: Jamaica, Marseille, Pornic, Argelès, New York… beaches as the true connecting thread running through lives.

In so doing, the author avoids the ease of autofiction or traditional autobiography. Beaches also become an excuse to discuss his other interests: literature, art, water sports and more…

Humor, self-deprecation and emotion. Over the course of the book, readers get an education almost without realizing it: shorelines seen through the eyes of a geographer, a historian, a sociologist and more…

The overall light-hearted tone makes the niches/beaches where the author reveals himself, sometimes with tremendous seriousness, all the more powerful.

Teodoro was born in Valencia, Spain in 1963… surely near a beach.

His grandfather got to France in February, 1939. He was held on the beach in Argelès, which became a concentration camp for Spanish Republicans.