Book of the week | When the sea was not blue (Editorial Espasa), by Daniel Entrialgo

There are books that combine the evasion caused by a good story with the learning of certainly curious concepts. When the sea was not blueof Daniel entrialgoit is one of the most representative cases that has fallen into our hands in recent times. An essay that starts with a disconcerting question: what if the sea was not always blue? It is not a subject of chemistry or physics, but of intuition, language and history. Entrialgo embarks on a very unique journey through culture, literature and perception, with blue as a conductive thread and the Mediterranean of Homer as a starting point.

The premise is unbeatable: an English aristocrat of the nineteenth, obsessed with the Iliaddevelops an exhaustive analysis of the work and discovers that in the poem the sea is never blue. It is color vino, negro, blancountil violetbut never blue. And the same goes for heaven. Didn’t they see it? Didn’t they name him? Or blue, simply, did not exist for them as we understand today? The Book of Entrialgo deepens that enigma, dismantling nineteenth -century theories about Daltonism and exploring how culture and language greatly influence perception.

The author travels with this pretext the history Of the blue: being rare and scarce, reserved for gods and emperors, to be omnipresent in our lives and clothing. Why are there people who see it in color? Does it have to do with an intoxicating sensation that those who observe it share? What tells us about how we describe the world? Entrialgo analyzes that synesthesia Ancient, where colors were also emotions, moods, even textures.

Journalist and writer, Daniel entrialgo (Vitoria, 1971) is, at present, deputy director of the magazine Forbes. During the last two decades he has worked and published in various media, in addition to being deputy director and member of the founding team of the Spanish edition of the magazine Esquire and magazine director GQ For more than seven years. He is also the novels Puskas (2018) y The tomb of the cosmonaut (2021), both published in Espasa. They can make bets what their favorite color is …

Where to buy it? Here.