***REGION 25: Europe VII

If you have not read the information on the master thread regarding the intent of these regional threads, please do this first.

***25. Europe VII: Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar

PORTUGAL

The Maias by Eca de Queiros

This magnificent 19th century novel has been called, 'The greatest book by Portugal's greatest novelist,' by Jose Saramago. Harold Bloom called it, 'one of the most impressive European novels of the nineteenth century, fully comparable to the most inspired novels of the great Russian, French, Italian and English masters of prose fiction.' I had never heard of this book or its author before I picked it up. I am so glad I did, and I will be reading more of de Queiros.

The book reminds me of Buddenbrooks, so for anyone who has read and loved Buddenbrooks that might be recommendation enough. The family in The Maias is much smaller than that in Buddenbrooks. After his mother runs away with her lover, and his father's tragic death, Carlos da Maia is raised by his wealthy grandfather. He studies at medical school, and as a young man becomes a dilettante in Lisbon society. Ultimately, he faces a tragedy that will form his character for the rest of his life.

What I loved about this book are the characters. The love Carlos's grandfather has for Carlos permeates the story. He is there behind the scenes, not intrusive, but his love is boundless. It takes Carlos a long time to realize this. The story of Carlos's friendship with Ega, another happy-go-lucky man-about the town is also beautifully portrayed. We should all be so lucky as to have such a friendship in our lives

Another book that sounds interesting -- thanks. I adore Buddenbrooks.

Spain

Todo es silencio by Manuel Rivas

Brentema, a small village on the coast in Galicia is the place where this story takes place. Fins, Leda and Brinco, the main characters, are children who live by the sea, learning from his elders that they must look, hear and keep silent if they want to survive. They also learn to respect the desires of Mariscal, who has made a fortune by smuggling and who rules the village. The novel follows the life of these characters from childhood to maturity and illustrates different aspects of life in the village always linked to the sea and to smuggling. The language in this book is very poetic and the author manages to convey well the atmosphere of the place, its mystery and its changing moods. This is a work in which there are many things which are not told but which are subtly insinuated, a great book!

The Tenant and The Motive by Javier Cercas (completed 1/6/11)

The Tenant and The Motive are two light yet darkly humorous novellas by one of Spain's leading contemporary authors, who is best known for his novel Soldiers of Salamis, the winner of the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In the first novella, a university professor of linguistics experiences a Kafkaesque turn of events after an ankle sprain, as a renowned (but unknown to him) fellow linguistics professor moves in next door to him, takes over his office and classes, and steals his girlfriend while he remains powerless to change his fate. In The Motive, a part-time lawyer and budding writer envisions a novel in which a young couple in financial straits murders an elderly man for his hidden money, but he has trouble putting voices to the characters. The writer befriends a couple and an old man who live in the same building as he, and, in a reversal of the concept of "life becomes art", he injects himself and alters their three lives, using taped conversations to write his story. These novellas were a joy to read, and I'll be looking for more of Cercas' works in the near future.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago (Portugal, completed 1/4/11)

In this captivating and intriguing novel, Saramago portrays Christ as an Everyman, an imperfect but deeply sensitive man plagued by doubt, insecurity, and passionate feelings toward and opinions about others, particularly Joseph and Mary Magdalene. It begins with the story of Joseph, a loving husband and good provider, and his young wife Mary, in the days leading up to Jesus' birth in a cave at the edge of Bethlehem. Soon afterward, Joseph overhears a group of soldiers discussing King Herod's premonition about the recent birth of the future King of the Jews, and his plan to kill all male children under three years of age. Joseph chooses to flee with his wife and young son, and his failure to warn the villagers of the plan results in the Massacre of the Innocents, an event that will plague Joseph the rest of his life and have a great impact upon the young Jesus after his father's death.

After Jesus learns of his death he undertakes a journey to escape his father's crime and to determine what his legacy is meant to be. He falls under the wing of a mysterious Shepherd, who seemingly knows a lot about Christ's past and future without being a Jew or a man of God. Jesus later encounters God in the desert, and there he learns about God's plan for him.

The most surprising and controversial aspects of the novel follow, as Christ engages in a relationship with Mary Magdalene after she treats and dresses his infected foot, and becomes conflicted with God's plan to instill Christianity throughout the world, which will result in the death and suffering of millions of believers and opponents.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ left me stunned and agape at several points, and I can certainly understand why it engendered such strong opposition, particularly by the Roman Catholic Church. However, I'm glad I read it, and I found it to be most enjoyable and unforgettable.

The Maias by José Maria Eça de Queirós, Portugal, originally published 1888, translation 2007

The Maia family is old and rich, but by the 1880s has shruk down to a grandfather and grandson. Trained as a doctor, the grandson Carlos (whose parents, both dead, had a tragic romance) lackadaisically sets up a Lisbon practice, but mostly spends time hanging out with friends of various sorts and having casual affairs with married women. before setting off a complicated chain of events by falling in love with one particular woman.

The novel, considered Eça de Queirós's masterpiece, paints a broad, often satiric portrait of the Portuguese upper classes, their prejudices, the world they lived in, their political and artistic controversies, and their place in the larger European context. While I found this insight into a world long gone (and deservedly so) fascinating, I became irritated by Carlos and his superficiality by the end of this lengthy book, and found the coincidence on which the plot turns a little contrived and melodramatic. Nonetheless, the characterizations are wonderful; all kinds of people, at least people of the nonworking classes, spring to life in Eça de Queirós's writing.

>7 rebeccanyc: Just reading through the thread...wow, you didn't waste anytime snapping that one up:-)

Well, I ordered it right away and then I had a long round-trip plane trip that seemed designed for a long, readable book!

2, 7: I've been wanting to try Eça de Queiróz for a while; I read an interview with Borges once where he talked about how much his mother and he liked to read Queiróz when he was a kid. Maybe I'll stop by the Portuguese fiction section of the library tomorrow!

SPAIN

Cantar de Mio Cid--Anonymous

This epic story of Spain's national hero, Rodrigo Ruy Díaz, a.k.a. El Cid, was a great deal of fun to read. The language is very colorful and I enjoyed trying to imitate the medieval Spanish language of El Cid and his compatriots. I was surprised by how realistic it was, and enjoyed the emphasis placed on calm, measured restraint over quick-tempered, violent reactions.

PORTUGAL

Blindness by Jose Saramago

“It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality, Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.”

The above passage is representative of the entire book – both the style, large chunks with no quotation marks with commas usually separating the dialog, and themes, philosophical discussions from an oft-present though unidentified narrator mixed with stark realities of a world in which a contagious white blindness strikes a country. In the dystopian society which develops, a large group is quarantined in an abandoned mental hospital. The characters remain unnamed as does the location. We follow them through gruesome trials and menial tasks. Saramago is a beautiful writer, though I don’t think for everyone. The pace is slow; the narrator frequently interjects pieces of plot information, past or future events, or simply musings. Another example:

“In fact, however reluctant we might be to admit it, these distasteful realities of life also have to be considered, when the bowels function normally, anyone can have ideas, debate, for example, whether there exists a direct relationship between the eyes and feelings, or whether the sense of responsibility is the natural consequence of clear vision, but when we are in great distress and plagued by pain and anguish that is when the animal side of our nature becomes most apparent.”

I enjoyed this very much, and I think it will stay with me for quite some time. Not a comfortable read but a very good one.

12: I've always liked that book a lot, and I've given away a few copies of it to friends. It's a fantastic premise for a story about human morality in difficult situations. The movie, though, was not so great.

SPAIN

Libro de buen amor (The Book of Good Love)--Juan Ruiz (Archipreste de Hita)

I'm not sure if many people in this group are interested in older (medieval) literature from around the world, but I wanted to mention two really great books written in medieval Spain. I've heard a lot of people compare The Book of Good Love to two other books of that time: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Bocaccio's Decameron. I think anyone who enjoys either of those two books would certainly be interested in Juan Ruiz's masterpiece, which is full of fables, parables and exempla, as well as great debates between the author and Don Amor and Doña Venus, and an epic showdown between Don Carnal and Doña Cuaresma. There's also a lot of romantic intrigue, as the author's procuress Trotaconventos tries to convince a series of ladies to acquiesce to the desires of her client.

I found this book particularly interesting because of its use of various levels of ambiguity in delivering its message on how to practice "good love." It requires an active reader who is able to make his or her own decisions about how to interpret the text. the Archipreste makes this clear from the beginning: those of us who want to find examples of good love will find them here, but those who wish to learn of the practice of another sort of love will also learn much from his book. It's rather subversive, really, and quite remarkable for a book whose two editions were written in 1330 and 1343.

There is an edition available on Amazon of a translation by Elisha Kent Kane which is, at least according to the user comments, a good one. I also found this copy of an advertisement from the original 1933 publication of this English translation:

The Book of Good Love translated into English Verse

The statement in that advertisement about Juan Ruiz writing this book while in prison is probably not true; it is highly likely that the prison he mentions is a metaphorical one...

SPAIN

La Celestina--Fernando de Rojas

This novel in dialogue was written right around 1500, and is an interesting bridge between medieval and Renaissance texts. It's a lot of fun too: the language is quite vulgar and the subject matter is pretty racy. Lots of sex, violence, witchcraft and prostitution. The tragic story of the romance between Calisto and Melibea, who are brought together with the help of the aging procuress Celestina, had a great deal of influence on the picaresque novels of the late-16th and early-17th centuries. I've been a fan of this book for a while, and was very pleased when I re-read it recently.

I've been reading medieval books because I wanted to get a better idea of Spanish literary traditions leading up to the turn of the 17th century, when Cervantes wrote Don Quijote. This book is especially compelling to a fan of Don Quijote because it depicts the trials and tribulations of Calisto, a chivalrous lover, when his idealized behavior clashes with the reality of the world that surrounds him; of course, a similar thing happens to Don Quijote when he roams Spain acting in accordance with the codes of chivalrous behavior established in books like Orlando furioso and Amadís de Gaula.

The Amazon.com web page for the English translation has some rather exuberant quotes about this book:

"A vibrantly alive work of art...It is no exaggeration to equate the artistic originality and conquests of Rojas with the achievements of Cervantes, Velazquez, or Goya."
-Juan Goytisolo, from the Introduction

"Without Celestina, the great tradition of the novel in Spanish would not exist: the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Juan Goytisolo all descend from Mother Celestina. In his brilliant translation, Peter Bush makes this classic of potions and passions into a delightfully intoxicating, uniquely Spanish treat for contemporary readers."
-Julio Ortega, Brown University

Anyway, it's certainly one of my favorite books!

Portugal The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago (originally published 1989, English translation 1996)

I am grateful to the Author Theme Reads group for making Saramago the mini-author for January-April; otherwise I would not have read this wonderful book. Saramago interweaves the story of a 20th century Lisbon proofreader, an isolated, serious, professionally responsible man, who unexpectedly inserts a "not" into a history of the siege of Lisbon, indicating that the Crusaders did not come to the aid of of the Christian Portuguese laying siege to the Moor-held city of Lisbon, with an alternative history of that 12th century siege told through the eyes of the participants, and with a love story. He is not only a wonderful story-teller, but an amazing writer with a magical way with language, almost piling words on to bring out very slightly different shades of meaning, finding the telling detail to illuminate character and place, exploring multiple facets of both contemporary and medieval life, and implicitly drawing parallels between them.

Through this story, Saramago plays with the meaning of history and the writing of history, the role of individuals, the centrality of daily life, the use and abuse of language, the grittiness of war, and the transformative power of love. His writing style is sometimes difficult to follow, requiring and rewarding careful attention, but is beautiful (and, I must assume, beautifully translated). I have to believe Saramago had fun writing this delightful book. This was my first Saramago, but it will not be my last.

PORTUGAL

Seeing by Jose Saramago

I loved Blindness and so was looking forward to this semi-sequel. Unfortunately it was a disappointment. The language is just as beautiful:

"The second voter took another ten minutes to appear, but from then on, albeit unenthusiastically, one by one, like autumn leaves slowly detaching themselves from the boughs of a tree, the ballot papers dropped into the ballot box."

And the premise is intriguing – that of an election where the majority of people submit blank ballots in the capital city, the government abandons the place, and political maneuverings follow in which the characters of Blindness become suspects. Somehow, though, it just didn’t hold my interest in the same way. I found the pacing extremely slow and kept setting it down for long periods.

I find the narration of both books fascinating. Sometimes it interjects as in this excerpt:

"or if it simply had to happen because that was its destiny, from which would spring soon-to-be-revealed consequences, forcing the narrator to set aside the story he was intending to write and to follow the new course that had suddenly appeared on his navigation chart. It is difficult to give such an either-or question an answer likely to satisfy such a reader totally. Unless, of course, the narrator wwere to be unusually frank and confess that he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale of a city which, en masse, decided to return blank ballot papers"

Another interesting bit is the unnamed characters. everyone is referred to in some way in which they are known – their job, something that happened to them etc. – except the dog which does have a name. Curious.

PORTUGAL

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero

The novel is narrated by H., a fifty-year old painter commissioned by S. for a portrait. The first few pages unfold slowly, telling of H.'s difficulties in producing two simultaneous portraits of his client. In order to get around to this problem, or more like to escape from it, H. decided to produce another third portrait of S., but this time the image will be in words. Through sudden impulse or instinct, H. decided to turn into writing (the "calligraphy" in the title).

I shall go on painting the second picture but I know it will never be finished. I have tried without success and there is no clearer proof of my failure and frustration than this sheet of paper on which I am starting to write. Sooner or later I shall move from the first picture to the second and then turn to my writing, or I shall skip the intermediate stage or stop in the middle of a word to apply another brushstroke to the portrait commissioned by S. or to that other portrait alongside it which S. will never see. When that day comes I shall know no more than I know today (namely, that both pictures are worthless). But I shall be able to decide whether I was right to allow myself to be tempted by a form of expression which is not mine, although this same temptation may mean in the end that the form of expression I have been using as carefully as if I were following the fixed rules of some manual was not mine either. For the moment I prefer not to think about what I shall do if this writing comes to nothing, if, from now on, my white canvases and blank sheets of paper become a world orbiting thousands of light-years away where I shall not be able to leave the slightest trace. If, in a word, it were dishonest to pick up a brush or pen or if, once more in a word (the first time I did not succeed), I must deny myself the right to communicate or express myself, because I shall have tried and failed and there will be no further opportunities.

The opening paragraph of a José Saramago is unmistakable in its trademark tone. The lulls and pauses in the phrasing are searching for a way forward. The prose is laden with hesitations and qualifications, trying to overcome the clauses that skirt away from the general idea. The ideas are spreading like ripples in the pond, emanating from the center of consciousness. Above the surface hovers a unique voice, a singular mind, a ruthless thought process. Below is raging calm, propagating through perfect control of rhythm. The only comparison I can immediately think of is the artful opening of a Javier Marías.

I never expected this book to develop right off the bat a similar theme of another novel I finished last year, also from the Portuguese. The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector (translated by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz) is narrated by a female painter who writes of her innermost consciousness and feelings the way colors unravel from the strokes of her paint brush, the way consciousness streams forth from a fountain of imagination. But where Lispector's prose issues forth quick as silver, Saramago's brush paints from a slow easel, building from primary colors as he established his plot. As in Lispector's "art book," plot is probably the least of Saramago's concern here. Manual is, from the outset, a novel of ideas: ideas about art, about the expressions and forms that art makes, and the relationships of these art forms.

Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia first came out in 1976, only Saramago's second published novel at that time. The first novel, still untranslated, appeared almost thirty years earlier. In between the two, he produced three collections of poetry (he did not publish poetry since then) and four collections of newspaper articles. The English translation of Manual appeared in hardcover from Carcanet Press in 1994, and in paperback from the same publisher a year later. The translation, however, has since gone out of print.

Among his earliest works in the original Portuguese, this novel is the first "window" to his works, not only because it remains to be the earliest with an English translation, but because it anticipates Saramago's mature themes, images, and preoccupations - names, blindness, political engagement, religion, love story. Last year The Collected Novels of José Saramago was released in e-book format, as an exclusive compendium of Saramago's fiction (twelve novels and one novella). This collection is missing Manual of Painting and Calligraphy.

Spain-a book i received as a reviewer for LT:

The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination… by Javier Cercas


This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
The Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas

A history, a meta-non-fiction, written by the acclaimed Spanish novelist Javier Cercas. An Anatomy of a Moment takes place on 23February at the Parliament building (Cortes) in Madrid, Spain. Throughout the end of 1980 the new Spanish democracy designed and assembled through the leadership of the former Francoist Alfonso Suarez has begun to unravel. In the prior two centuries of Spanish history a coup d’état, or as the Spanish call it: a golpe de estado, had occurred over 50 times. The last, in 1936, had brought Franco into power. The new democracy began in 1976 at King Juan Carlos’s request following Franco’s death, but by 1980 Suarez had lost the support of all his constituents: the King, the church, the military, the leftists, the bankers and businessmen. Picked by the King as an “errand boy” to serve as a transitional figure Suarez had outlived his usefulness.

This book focuses on several of the leading characters and protagonists at the center of this moment: Prime Minister Alfonso Suarez, the Communist party leader Santiago Carillo, the Deputy prime Minister General Gutierrez Mellado, Lt. Colonel Tejero who entered the Cortes pistol in hand like his predecessor General Pavia who entered on horseback in 1874, the military boss behind the plot and the former Secretary to the king, General Alfonso Armado and many of his fellow golpistas. Cercas deftly provides background information on all and describes the intermingled web of relationships that connect them all to this moment in the Spanish Republic’s history.

Referring to the famous photo of Tejero with three pointed hat and pistol in hand he effectively builds a panoramic shot inclusive of the various politicians cowering under their desks, the courageous Suarez defiantly smoking a cigarette as he sits erect behind his desk and on the other side of the Cortes Carillo too defiantly refusing to cower in fear.

Cercas draws on historic contexts as he writes that “history repeats itself. Marx observed that great events and characters appear in history twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, just as in moments of profound transformation men, frightened by their responsibility, invoked the spirits of the past, adopted their names, their mannerisms and slogans to represent with the prestigious disguise and detachable language a new historical scene as if it were a séance.”

As an American (USA) reader much of the nuances of Spanish history are unfamiliar yet enough is explained that (with an occasional assist form Wikipedia) I was able to gain a deeper insight into Spain’s recent history of its republic. Much of Franco and the Falangist past is a part of this history and the Republics survival is in response to this.

In This intriguing re-imagination of his country's history Javier Cercas has thrown down the gauntlet bidding other great novelists do likewise with their own national histories. I began to wonder how several of our current novelists could approach our recent events: the Clinton years, the Reagan years, both Bushes and the historic Obama; all could be imagined and understood on a deeper level if mined by a novelists touch. Several moments in our own history come to mind: the Oliver North hearings, Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council, Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman”, LBJ taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One as it made its way back to DC form Dallas: all these moments are seared in photographic memory waiting to be dramatized. If Cercas was from the United States he might be busy at this very moment writing his next book.

Spain: Het geheim van de Hoffmans (El secreto de los Hoffman) by Alejandro Palomas - 4 stars

When the ex-husband, the daughter and the two grand-children meet for the funeral of the grand-mother, a family-secret hangs between them like fog. The death of the two parents of the grand-children over 20 years ago not only has caused a rift in the family but also had a deep personal impact on every individual involved. In the days that follow the funeral, the family learns to deal with their past and tries to find a new balance.
This is a gem of a book, not so much because of the story - 200 pages is far too little to go into each person's character in depth - but because of the beautiful style and poetic language, the subtlety of the phrasing, the delicacy of the words. Reading this book is like watching a family-portrait where the people come to life while you're watching. Recommended, but - as often - not yet available in English yet, I'm afraid.

Portugal: Act of the Damned by António Lobo Antunes - 4 stars

A whirlwind of a book about a Portuguese family in the 1970's, gathering together by the death-bed of the patriarch of the family, when their own world of wealth as they knew it is falling apart. With a vivid street-party in the background, the family's own disasters are taking place. The strength and beauty of this book especially lies in the extraordinary way in which Antunes writes. E.g. when one person thinks, you follow his of her way of thinking to the extreme, with thoughts tumbling, falling over one another in turmoil and chaos. The storyline is not as important although it's biting and sarcastic as to emphasize the tone.
This was not an easy read but very rewarding in the end. If you like Garcia Marquez, you might give this one a try. It certainly is very different from anything I've read lately (and ever)...

The House of Ulloa is a late 19th century classic from Spain, written by a woman too!!! This novel was many things, and a certainly don't know how to give you a synopsis. A naive priest (yes, many a Latino story starts with a naive priest) is sent to work as the chaplain for the House of Ulloa, a crumbling estate with more pretensions than class. Once he is there, he sees sin when it hits him over the head but always finds excuses to deal with the problems another day. He also finds that the marquis is hardly the one in charge. His attempt to make things better results in the betrayal of the woman he most admires.

This book contains politics, infidelity, domestic violence, corruption with a pinch of gothic on the top. Well done and thought provoking. I'm hoping to find more of Emilia Pardo Bazan's fiction translated into English.

Andorra: Andorra by Peter Cameron

The story is set in the idyllic but fictionalized mini-state of Andorra (in reality landlocked in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, in this novel conveniently situated at the sea). The story slowly unwinds as the main character moves to Andorra and meets some people who influence his new life. It all leads to a climax that was interesting though a bit underwhelming. The beauty of this book primarily lies in the wonderful, dreamy setting and the elegant prose, minus points were the characters who were a bit too gimmicky, their stories a bit too plain and predictable. It felt as if the author forgot what he wanted to do with the story and suddenly decided to put an end to it. But all in all, a relaxing, enjoyable read.

Spain: Guadalajara by Quim Monzó

Quim Monzó (1952-) is an award winning Catalan novelist, short story writer and journalist who was born in Barcelona, where he continues to reside. This collection of short stories was originally published in 1996, and was subsequently translated into English by Peter Bush for Open Letter Books, who published it last year.

Guadalajara consists of a mixture of surreal, sometimes grotesque, and occasionally wickedly funny tales about the absurdities of everyday life and past and present customs. In the first story, "Family Life", a nine year old boy openly questions a longstanding family ritual on the eve of his ceremony, which leads to unexpected consequences. "Life Is So Short" concerns a chance meeting between a man and a woman who find themselves alone and attracted to each in a temporarily disabled elevator. In "Centripetal Force", a man is unable to leave his apartment on an ordinary day, and his subsequent attempts draw his girlfriend, neighbors and others into his plight.

Also included are several satirical tales about well known characters and stories. In "Gregor", a beetle is suddenly transformed into a boy; in "Outside the Gates of Troy" the Greeks within the Trojan horse are faced with an unexpected complication to their plan to enter the city; and "A Hunger and Thirst for Justice" concerns Robin Hood's attempts to rob the rich, who are increasingly bored by his exploits, and help the local peasants, who question his ethics and are unappreciative of his efforts.

I enjoyed this clever collection of stories, and I look forward to reading his novel Gasoline, which has also been recently published by Open Letter Press.

SPAIN:

Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós
First published in Spanish as Fortunata y Jacinta 1887
English translation by Agnes Moncy Gullón 1986



Fortunata and Jacinta is widely considered to be the greatest Spanish novel of the 19th century. The setting is Madrid in the 1870s, a time of great political turmoil. While the novel references some of the historical events taking place at the time, its focus is an intensely detailed and realistic portrait of the characters who inhabit it.

Juan Santa Cruz, the spoiled only child of a prosperous merchant family, has grown up to become an idle playboy. The latest object of his attentions is Fortunata, the beautiful and free-spirited niece of a local market vendor. She becomes his mistress. Appalled at the possibility of a connection to someone so far below their own social level, Juan's parents hustle him into courtship and marriage. His bride is Jacinta: pretty, refined, saintly, and loving. For a while, Jacinta makes her husband forget about Fortunata.

Meanwhile, Fortunata has caught the eye of Maximiliano Rubín, a sickly young pharmacy student. "Maxi," pious and chaste, makes it his project to redeem Fortunata from her poverty and her sinful past. He is determined to make her his wife, even though she confesses she can never love such a pathetic creature. Besieged by a flood of priestly advice from all sides, Fortunata consents to a loveless marriage to save her soul. But once she's another man's wife, Juan Santa Cruz, bored with Jacinta, comes back into her life. The ecstasy and anguish she has experienced in the past is nothing compared with what's to come.

Fortunata is the novel's pivotal character and its central idea. Crude and illiterate, yet beautiful and artlessly charming, violent yet loving, spiteful but forgiving, she both enchants and exasperates everyone around her. Everyone is always trying to change Fortunata--to reform her, tame her, and educate her--and she is always trying to change herself. Yet in the end, one closest to her admits that all these efforts were in vain:

I wasn't the only one who was deceived; she was, too. We defrauded each other. We didn't take nature into account, the grand mother and teacher who rectifies the errors of those of her children who go astray. We do countless foolish things and nature corrects them. We protest against her admirable lessons, which we don't understand, and when we want her to obey us, she grabs us and smashes us to bits, as the sea does whoever tries to rule it.

The intractability of human nature is demonstrated in the public sphere as well as the private. During the period of Fortunata and Jacinta Spain went through several governments, from monarchy to republic and back to monarchy. These events aren't directly shown in the novel--the characters' lives are remarkably unaffected, in fact, by their country's state of virtual anarchy--but we see opinions and convictions vacillate as frequently as the political winds change. Just as Juan Santa Cruz always wants the woman he shouldn't have, the public is always in favor of the faction that is out of power at the moment.

Fortunata and Jacinta is about a place almost as much as it is about people. Pérez Galdós describes Madrid in loving detail: the rhythms of daily life, the sounds and smells of the market place, the ebb and flow of trade, the traffic jams and quiet alleyways, the hullabaloo of café society. The physical world is constantly a part of the novel in the texture of clothing, the taste of a confection, the distant sound of a piano, and the vibration from booted feet climbing the stairs.

Pérez Galdós writes in the realist tradition of Balzac, depicting human nature and behavior as he sees it. It is up to the reader to decide if Fortunata is a devil or an angel. The author is transparent and non-judgmental, providing physical description and letting his characters' thoughts and speech convey feelings and ideas. This does make for some long and relatively uneventful passages, and there are some prolonged and not indispensable side trips into the affairs of some lesser characters. In the end, though, Fortunata and Jacinta is a rewarding novel, not as great as, but similar in many ways to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

PORTUGAL

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro by Antonio Tabucchi



This literary thriller opens in a gypsy settlement outside of Oporto, Portugal. Manolo, one of the older men in the village, takes his usual early morning walk in the woods, and finds a headless body that was not there the day before. He notifies the Guardia Nacional, the police department in Oporto, and the crime is reported by the local media. Firmino, the crime reporter for O Acontecimento, a sensationalist rag in Lisbon, is sent to interview Manolo and investigate the murder. With the help of a local and well connected owner of a pension, he meets Manolo and a witness to the crime, and discovers that their accounts differ significantly from the ones provided by the Guardia Nacional officers that arrested the young man, who is subsequently identified as Damasceno Monteiro. Firmino is subsequently introduced to Loton, a morbidly obese lawyer and polymath, who comes from a wealthy family but has dedicated his life to representing the downtrodden of Oporto in court. Loton serves as an adviser to Firmino and his investigation, while in turn Firmino helps Loton with the case. The two engage in interesting but occasionally obtuse philosophical discussions about society, the unequal distribution of justice, and the use of torture to maintain and control individuals.

While I didn't enjoy Damasceno Monteiro as much Pereira Declares, Tabucchi's masterpiece, it was a very good mystery novel with interesting characters and a solid plot line.

Spain

I finished and reviewed Sepharad by Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina. Although not all of the book takes place in Spain it really revolves around Spanish culture and history, especially regarding the 20th century consequences of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. That's a wholly inadequate description of an intensely wonderful book.

SPAIN

A Thousand Morons by Quim Monzó

  

Quim Monzó is one of the most highly regarded contemporary Catalan authors, who has only recently been recognized in the English speaking world thanks in large part to Open Letter Books, which has published three of his books in translation in the past three years, Gasoline, Guadalajara, and A Thousand Morons. Although he has written several novels, articles and essays, he is best known in Spain and Europe for his short stories, which are generally surreal and comedic works filled with identifiable characters who find themselves in absurd situations, largely of their own doing.

A Thousand Morons, originally published in 2007, is the latest collection of short stories by Monzó to be translated into English. The first portion of the book consists of longer works, such as "Mr. Beneset", in which a man visits his somewhat unorthodox father in an old people's home, and "Love Is Eternal", about a man who decides to marry his apparently dying girlfriend, whereas most of the stories in the second part are less than five pages in length, including "Next Month's Blood", where the archangel Gabriel receives a surprise when he tells Mary that God has decided to bless her with a son, and "A Cut", in which a boy with a large neck wound is upbraided by his teacher for interrupting class and spilling blood on the floor.

Monzó excels in portraying an ordinary character in a everyday situation that slowly unfolds into a wickedly surreal one. My favorite was "Saturday", a story about a woman who progressively gets rid of everything was owned by and reminds her of her former husband, but then goes just a bit overboard in the process.

I thoroughly enjoyed this short story collection, and I look forward to reading the other three books by Monzó that I already own.

28> Interesting! Does Monzó write in Spanish or in Catalan?

>29 rocketjk: Catalan.

SPAIN
Eenzaamheid (Solitud) by Victor Catala (ps. Caterina Albert i Paradía) (1904) - 3,5 stars

In my search for a suitable book for my personal Reading Through Time-challenge, I found this wonderful book, written by a Catalan author. It's quite a simple story about a young woman who moves to the Spanish Pyrenees with her husband, a lowlife who's not worthy of her. She has to get used to the rugged life in a desolate landscape and harsh living-conditions. Helped by an old shepherd, she finds consolation in the dramatic nature surrounding her but after a crisis, she decides to leave the Pyrenees.
This is a book that I find typical for the early 1900s, with a lot of naturalism and symbolism where nature plays its own role in the story and interacts with the feelings and thoughts of the woman. I like this kind of book, once and awhile, but not too often, as it can become a bit heavy. But, all in all a good book.

SPAIN

Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé



This clever and strangely beautiful novel is set in Barcelona in 1945, as World War II draws to a close and Generalísimo Francisco Franco is slowly and brutally gaining control over the remaining opposition to his fascist rule of Spain. The book is narrated by the unborn child of Rosa, a beautiful redhead whose husband has disappeared after he is sought by police on the suspicion that he is participating in subversive political activities. The unnamed fetus communicates with his brother David, a 14 year old who unabashedly loves, supports and protects his mother while blaming the fetus for her failing health. David also engages in surreal conversations with his missing father, a British fighter pilot whose poster hangs on the wall of his room, and his older brother. At the same time he befriends Paulino, an equally troubled boy of his age, and attempts to protect his mother from Inspector Galván, a widower who is investigating his father's disappearance while he showers Rosa with attention and gifts.

David's internal conversations and external relationships are the central feature of the novel, and although the characters are vividly drawn the reader is never completely sure where truth ends and fantasy begins, which creates a growing sense of uncertainty, tension and menace, as the lives of David, Rosa and Paulino spin like wobbly tops at the edge of a table.

Lizard Tails is a gripping story about post-Civil War Spain and the psychological effects that the Franco regime had on ordinary citizens and their oppressors, which was quite unique in its narration and humorous despite its grim setting. Juan Marsé is one of the most respected and decorated Catalan novelists, and this book, which won two major literary awards in Spain, served as an excellent introduction to his work.

SPAIN
La sombra del viento (The shadow of the wind) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2001)



It's easy to see why this has been such a huge success: CRZ is a great storyteller, and kept me hooked for 500 pages, even though I was struggling through it painfully slowly with copious use of the dictionary function of my e-reader. For those who don't know, it's basically a historical mystery set in Barcelona in the forties and fifties, with a back-story in the early 1920s. The narrator finds a mysterious old book and tries to find out more about it and its elusive author. There's a fantasy element centered on the conceit of the "cemetery of forgotten books", but that only plays a very small part in the story, which is otherwise basically realistic, if somewhat romantic. Barcelona's turbulent political history also plays only a rather minor part, mostly just as a convenient way of accounting for off-stage deaths. I believe it can get quite warm and sunny in Barcelona, but for the purposes of this book it seems to be always winter and never Christmas: just about every scene over a period of some ten years takes place against a background of bad weather.

Definitely a good read if you've got a long 'plane journey in front of you, but don't expect anything very profound. It's a romance.

(I haven't posted in this group for ages, but since I'm on a mission to improve my Spanish, I seem to be reading a lot of things by Spanish authors at the moment.)

SPAIN, GIBRALTAR
La carta esferica (The nautical chart) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (2000)



Pérez-Reverte is known for his cloak-and-rapier novels featuring the 16th century professional soldier Captain Alatriste (and bringing in lots of references to Velasquez and the Spanish poets of the period), but he also writes noir historical thrillers of the type where competing groups of present-day characters follow a series of clues to unravel some event in the distant past. These also usually have a strong literary flavour (Club Dumas is the best-known).

La carta esferica is all about a hunt for sunken treasure, and rather surprisingly takes its most direct inspiration from the Tintin story Red Rackham's treasure, which is explicitly and implicitly referred to many times in the text. But it also draws on all the other classics of nautical literature, from RLS and Patrick O'Brian to Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville. The hero, Coy, is a mix of Ishmael, Lord Jim and Captain Haddock; the leading lady, Tanger, takes the Tintin role. As usual with P-R, the idiom and the development of the plot is also very tied up with the American noir genre, in which the hero has to be a jaded cynic who knows that the age of chivalry is long past, but who still can't stop himself from living out his quixotic notions of honour and duty. The big down-side of this genre, which P-R seems to be quite blind to, is the way it dictates that women have to be either vulnerable victims or dangerous schemers (and that the unhappy hero has to fall in love with them, whichever they are).

Apart from all that genre-mashing, we get a nice picturesque tour of Barcelona, Madrid, Cadiz, Gibraltar and Cartagena, and we get some excellent sailing and diving sequences: it's all good fun in the end, although I did feel that P-R could have done a bit more with the 18th-century historical back-story, which rather dropped out of sight in the second half of the book.

SPAIN
Nada by Carmen Laforet (1944)



A very engaging coming-of-age novel set in Barcelona shortly after the Civil War, a huge success for the 23-year-old Carmen Laforet when it first appeared. Like many other novels by young writers of the forties and fifties, it deals with the generation gap experienced by those who grew up just after the war. With the complication, in Laforet's case, that she is writing under censorship that puts almost any direct mention of what happened in Barcelona in the last ten years out of bounds. She deals with this problem very adroitly by putting the gaps and silences (the "Nada" of the title) into the foreground, and leaving us to work everything out for ourselves, as her protagonist, Andrea, has to. She even manages to slip in what to a modern reader looks very like a homoerotic subtext, but was obviously meant to be explainable as a normal, intense adolescent friendship between two young women. Hmm.

Still definitely well worth a read seventy years later. Laforet died in 2004, having written a whole string of other novels, stories and travel books, but nothing that came remotely near the success of Nada. On LT there are currently over 500 copies of Nada, and only nine of her next most popular work. One of the depressing things about growing up is the moment when you realise that you are not going to be the next Françoise Sagan - maybe it's even more depressing when you get to middle-age and realise that you were...

SPAIN
Todas las almas (All Souls) by Javier Marías (1989)



A Spanish academic, the same who later becomes the narrator of Your face tomorrow, recalls two years spent teaching in the Institutio Tayloriana (the modern languages department of Oxford University). Nothing very demanding — some reflections on the peculiarities of Oxford life, some thoughts on how we create other people in our minds through the narratives we construct about them, a long digression about the real (but improbable) writers Arthur Machen and John Gawsworth and the Kingdom of Redonda — but this relatively early work is a nice introduction to Javier Marías's very distinctive style. If you don't like this, you aren't likely to enjoy the much more challenging subject-matter of his later books.

I still haven't worked out the relevance of the cover illustration of the Spanish edition: apparently Spanish publishers still hold to the theory, so dear to their British colleagues in the seventies, that a naked woman on the cover will increase the sales of any book...

This was one I already had on my TBR shelf in translation, but I stood firm and read it in the original.

SPAIN
Niebla (Mist) by Miguel de Unamuno (1914)



The philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) was one of the members of the celebrated group of (broadly-speaking: modernist, liberal, anti-clerical) Spanish intellectuals known as the "Generación del 98"; he was for many years Rector of the university of Salamanca and famously defied the Nationalist general Millán-Astray in his last public speech there in October 1936.

Niebla, originally published in 1914, is his best-known work of fiction. It's very much a novel written by a philosophy professor, where the characters are constantly breaking off the action to discuss the fundamental problems of human existence, but it's presented in a very playful and entertaining way. The ostensible storyline is a rather silly romantic comedy full of rival suitors, servants, scheming aunts and misunderstandings: it could a P.G. Wodehouse story, but it also has an Enlightenment flavour that would go well with Beaumarchais, Diderot, or Sterne (in fact, it would have been perfect for the plot of a Mozart/Da Ponte opera). However, the Bertie Wooster/Almaviva protagonist, Augusto, is not a romantic buffoon, but a tragic existentialist hero after the manner of Meursault, who is ultimately destroyed by his inability to find convincing evidence of his own existence. There is also a metatextual element, with not one but two putative authors jumping in and out of the story and arguing about whether it is a novel or something quite different, a nivola. It sounds like a mess, but Unamuno has both the charm and the intellectual strength of purpose to get away with it, and I think it would be quite readable even for someone who doesn't really care for philosophy.

SPAIN

Las edades de Lulú (The ages of Lulu) by Almudena Grandes (1989)

This is one of those erotic novels it's perfectly respectable to have on your bookshelves because of its claims to literary seriousness. But don't think you're kidding anyone: in the end it's an erotic fantasy, and you either enjoy it as that or you don't.

It is set in Madrid in the seventies and eighties, and there is a little bit of background about the last years of Franco, but it didn't really strike me as an especially Spanish book. Grandes is in effect taking the format of the American gay novel of the late seventies/early eighties, replacing the transgressive, hedonist protagonist by a similarly transgressive heterosexual woman, and saying “Hey, we claim that territory too!”

So there's a bit of a feminist hook to it, but she recognises that in doing that, she also ends up with a narrative arc suspiciously similar to that of the classic exploitative female protagonist/male reader erotic novel of the Fanny Hill type, and indeed she deliberately invites the comparison in places, but she sets herself apart from this genre by destabilising the narrative framework, tricking us into taking the narrator’s fantasies as part of the main storyline and then stepping back from this, until we realise that the whole thing is only a game and a fantasy. She also has a lot of fun with the conventional imagery of sex as a form of play, by deliberately muddying the boundary between “sex toys” and those of childhood, until we have to ask ourselves whether there is anything grown-up about sex at all, if it isn't the thing that defines being grown-up...?

SPAIN
Tattoo by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Originally published 1976; English translation 2008.



When I learned on LT that Camilleri named the delightful Inspector Montalbano in homage to Montalbán and his detective protagonist, Pepe Carvalho, I knew I had to read at least one book by him. And while Carvalho and Montalbán can't compare to Montalbano and Camilleri, I mostly enjoyed this book and would probably read more novels about Carvalho.

Pepe Carvalho is a freelance detective and, we learn, former CIA agent, in Franco-era Barcelona; his girlfriend is a prostitute and he carries a gun and a knife around with him. In this book, the owner of a beauty salon asks Carvalho to find out the name of a mysterious man who winds up dead in the water, a man who has a tattoo on his back saying "Born to raise hell in hell." Carvalho is suspicious because the man is paying him a lot for this information when he could go to the police, and in the aftermath of the discovery of the man the police start closing down bars and brothels. Carvalho's investigation takes him to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and then back to Barcelona, with a variety of twists and turns. There was more violence, and more graphic violence, in this novel that in the Camilleris, and some of it was a little disturbing.

Like Montalbano, Carvalho is a gourmet, and the descriptions of the meals he cooked and ate in restaurants were just as delightful as those in Camilleri. The atmospherics of Barcelona and Amsterdam were the strong point of this novel, more so than the plot, although it was ingeniously plotted. And, except for his violent streak, I enjoyed the Carvalho's character.

My edition, published by Melville House in their International Crime series, was marred by sloppy proofreading: "selef" for "self" and a line that broke in the middle of the page for no reason, for example.

SPAIN
El Camino (The Way) by Miguel Delibes (1950)



When looking for possible things to read in Spanish, I kept coming across the name of Miguel Delibes (1920-2010), and my curiosity was aroused by the way he seems to be the only major Spanish writer whose works on LT are not dominated by English translations. One reason for that is obviously simply timing: he wrote all his main works between 1950 and the mid-70s, which not only ties him rather directly into the Franco era, but also puts him into that awkward gap between the current and the out-of-copyright classic that is so frustrating for publishers. The theme he is most identified with, la caza — the peculiarly southern-European habit of celebrating one's affection for the natural world by going into the woods and slaughtering small songbirds — is also one that is not especially likely to appeal to the people who buy translated novels in English-speaking countries.

His breakthrough work, El Camino, was published in 1950 and was his third novel. It deals with the daily life of a remote village in the Spanish countryside, as seen though the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy who is on the point of leaving the village for the first time to go to boarding school in the big city.

It's something between a coming-of-age novel and a timeless portrait of life in a small community. There's a great deal of local colour, it positively drips with charm and sentiment, but it's not just chocolate-box: there's a lot of hard reality under the picturesque details, and probably rather too much sex and death for the average eleven-year-old to be entirely comfortable with. It becomes clear as you read it that it's a very cleverly constructed book, using all sorts of narrative tricks to build up the picture of how the village works and how Daniel comes to terms with the irreversibility of growing-up (which, as we all know, is one of the scariest things about childhood).

Superficially, it feels a bit like Just William as Marcel Pagnol might have written it, and there is also an occasional echo of the morality of Don Camillo (but without Guareschi's robust humour) — all of which probably just says that it's typical of the way writers of a nostalgic and moderately conservative frame of mind dealt with the challenges of post-war Europe.

Interesting, and very agreeable to read (with a splendidly weepy ending), but you probably wouldn't want too much of it.

SPAIN
Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis) by Javier Cercas (2001)



Cercas has already been mentioned a couple of times on this thread — Soldados de Salamina was the novel that first brought him international attention when it appeared in 2001.

Looking at the cover image, I was afraid that this would turn out to be a gritty war story, but actually it turns out to be a complicated, rather ironic, meditation about why wars are fought and how we deal with the memory of war. Setting our normal preconceptions back-to-front, he takes an intellectual from the nationalist side and a "simple" soldier from the republican side as his central characters, and sets both their stories against the comic tale of the naive and slightly clumsy journalist, "Javier Cercas", who (with the support of his astoundingly bimbo-ish girlfriend and assistance of a distinguished Chilean exile called "Roberto Bolaño") is attempting to gather material for a book called Soldados de Salamina. It's very cleverly set up, with Cercas spending the first two-thirds of the book feeding you the information you need to understand the last part, giving you just enough to keep you interested whilst letting you work out for yourself that there's still something important missing from the mixture.

It took me some time to understand the significance of the title ("what on earth has Salamis to do with the Spanish civil war?"), and that's one thing that Cercas never makes explicit, but it does make perfect sense when you think about it a little.

SPAIN
Los Enamoramientos (The Infatuations) by Javier Marías (2011)

In a column written for El País and appended to the edition I read, Marías claims that his latest novel is thoroughly pessimistic and contains no comic scenes at all. That isn't entirely true, of course. This is a book that takes a very gloomy view of human nature and modern society - as he says in the El País Article, one of the big themes in the novel is the “problem of impunity”, the way we allow each other to get away with terrible acts - but there is actually quite a lot of comedy below the surface. For one thing, Marías is clearly sending up his own style. There is not one “interrupted doorbell” scene but two: in both cases we get several chapters between the pressing of the bell and the opening of the door. The death of an important character is announced on page one. There's a character called Javier who has incredibly sexy lips, expects his girlfriends to leave their skirts on during sex, and talks exactly like the narrator of a Javier Marías novel (the actual narrator this time is called María(!)). Since María is a publisher, there are plenty of opportunities for little digs at the vanity of authors. And so on.
The usual clarity and density of ideas we expect from Marías is there, as is the slightly unexpected mix of literary inspirations that Marías draws on, turns upside-down, uses to give us false leads about where the plot is going, and generally gets more out of than their authors ever could have imagined: Balzac and Dumas in particular, this time, and of course the inevitable references to Macbeth. But it's definitely Macbeth without MacDuff this time: whatever effect the bad things people do might have on their own consciences, we shouldn't expect to see trees heading for Dunsinane any time soon.
Probably the best thing Marías has done apart from the trilogy, and highly recommended unless you are an incurable romantic.

CATALONIA

Gasoline by Quim Monzó



Heribert is a renowned painter whose work is scheduled to be shown in a double exhibition in less than a month. However, he cannot find the motivation to create anything that pleases him. Instead of working on his paintings as the deadline draws near, he spends his mornings lying in bed for hours idly watching the second hand of his clock, and his afternoons and evenings in sex shops, restaurants, and in the company of lovers who bore him (and the reader), as he obsesses about his never present wife, Helena, who is seemingly having an affair of her own.

Our man is felled by an absurd accident which prevents him from completing his assignment, similar to a lazy child who claims that his dog ate his homework. Humbert, a young and unknown artist who happens to be his wife's lover, submits his paintings in his place, to rave reviews, as Heribert wallows in the muck of existential angst.

Gasoline was a thoroughly maddening read, as I found Heribert to be a useless, pathetic and intensely dislikable tortured artiste. This book was supposedly about the creative process in art, but none of its characters captured my attention or earned an ounce of sympathy from me.

SPAIN

Nada by Carmen Laforet, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman



This semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, written in 1943 when the author was 22 years of age, is widely considered to be one of the best novels of the post-Spanish Civil War period. It was largely unknown in the English speaking world until Edith Grossman's translation of it was published in 2007. It won the inaugural Premio Nadal, one of the oldest and most prestigious Spanish literary prizes, in 1944, and it continues to be widely read more than 70 years after its initial publication.

The novel opens in Barcelona in 1939, shortly after the Civil War has ended, as Andrea, an 18 year old orphan from the country who has won a scholarship and a small stipend to the Universtat de Barcelona, arrives in the city. She intends to stay with her grandmother on Carrer d'Aribau in the city's well to do L'Eixample neighborhood, in a home that she remembers fondly from her stay there as a young child.

The Civil War has been devastating to the residents of Barcelona, including Andrea's grandmother and her family. What was once an opulent and spacious apartment is now one half of its original size, decaying and filthy, and filled with decrepit relics from her grandparents' former wealth. Andrea provides a powerful description of the main bathroom on the night of her arrival, as she prepares to take a shower:

That bathroom seemed like a witches' house. The stained walls had traces of hook-shaped hands, of screams of despair. Everywhere the scaling walls opened their toothless mouths, oozing dampness. Over the mirror, because it didn't fit anywhere else, they'd hung a macabre still life of pale bream and onions against a black background. Madness smiled from the bent faucets.

The sense of claustrophobia and inhospitality is intensified by Andrea's extended family, and their struggles with poverty and hunger. Her grandmother, once a proud and virile matriarch, is now a senile and frail old woman, who doesn't recognize Andrea at first, and she confuses her with Gloria, her beguiling but maddening daughter in law. Gloria is tormented by her abusive and domineering husband Juan, his musically talented but shady and mentally unstable brother Román, and their suffocatingly devout and controlling sister Angustias. The family members routinely engage in bitter and sometimes violent arguments, similar to the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist play No Exit, and Andrea is frequently dragged into the middle of these heated battles.

Andrea finds respite from this house of horrors in her studies, and especially in the company of her classmate and best friend Ena, a beautiful girl from a merchant family whose wealth and social standing have not been adversely affected by the war. Their relationship is occasionally fractious, due to Andrea's diffidence and to Ena's desire to know more about her friend's family and particularly her uncle Román, who Ena is strangely attracted to.

As the novel proceeds, Andrea's sense of independence grows, while at the same time she recognizes that she needs intimacy and friendship as an essential balance to the chaos and increasingly disturbing behavior of her family and her best friend. However, she is caught in the middle of a contracting whirlwind surrounded by these characters, one that she has little control over and that threatens her own sanity.

Nada is a fascinating and superbly written novel about adolescence, despair and escape, set in a city under siege that is attempting to regain its footing and former glory after a crippling war. This insightful debut novel reminded me of Carson McCullers's first book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and Laforet's effort is nearly as good as that masterpiece.

SPAIN

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes by Anonymous
Originally published 1554; my English translation published 2005.



I found this classic work of Spanish literature mildly entertaining, definitely satiric, and undoubtedly much more shocking when it was written (hence, the anonymous authorship) than it is today. Narrated by Lazaro himself, it tells the tale of his work as a servant for various, mostly harsh and, indeed, abusive, masters, starting with a blind man when he was but a boy, and progressing through working for a penniless squire who nonetheless acts as if he has money but doesn't deign to work, various, largely corrupt, representatives of the church, and a constable, eventually achieving a position of his own in government. This allows the anonymous author much opportunity for satire, as well as the opportunity to show the hardships prevalent in 16th century Spain. I found the chapter in which Lazaro works for a seller of indulgences especially funny, but overall I didn't enjoy this book as much as the introduction by Juan Goytisolo led me to believe I would. As an added note, this is said to be the first picaresque novel.

SPAIN

Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós
Originally published 1893; my English translation 2014



This is a strange and depressing book, relieved by the portrait of a budding feminist young woman. Tristana is an orphaned 19-year-old, entrusted to and taken in by an old family friend who tried to help her parents when they fell on hard times. But this family friend, Don Lope Garrido, is an unrepentant Don Juan: he "was a skilled strategist in the war of love and prided himself on having stormed more bastions of virtue and captured more strongholds of chastity than he had hairs on his head." Soon, of course, he adds Tristana to his "very long list of victories over innocence."

Needless to say, Tristana is depressed by her life with Don Lope, especially because most of the day she helps the servant, Saturna, and is confined to the house. But she is able to go out with Saturna when she goes shopping or visits her son, who she had to place in an institution when her husband died and she had to go to work, and in the course of one of these excursions she meets a young artist, Horacio. Of course, they fall in love, and talk talk talk about their love, his art, and his unhappy childhood. But Tristana is enlivened not only by love but also by her innate imagination and ability to think, as we would now say, outside the box. She develops a love for and skill at painting and drawing, once they progress to Horacio's studio; reads literature; and declares she never wants to marry but wants to have her own work which will support her. And this in 19th century Spain! She turns out to be enormously talented at languages, and eventually music, too.

But things do not go well. Don Lope, of course, has his suspicions. Horacio has to take his elderly aunt to a house he owns near the Mediterranean, and the lovers correspond daily. I found this section, with their endless epistolary expressions of love, tedious. And then, Tristana has a very serious health crisis, which in turn provokes Don Lope to discover he truly cares about her "as a daughter" and to realize that the relationship with Horatio will come to naught because of both changes in Tristana and Horacio's reaction to the aftermath of her health problem. The changes in Tristana because of this crisis and its aftermath are not entirely hard to believe, but they also seem to be very dependent on a a time and a place. I found the conclusion of the novel depressing, but the last lines of it are brilliant.

All in all, I'm glad I read this book. Parts of it were, as I said, tedious, and overall I found it hard to read, but it was a fascinating portrait of two people, Tristana and Don Lope. The introduction to my NYRB edition notes that Pérez Galdós wrote other books with the names of women as titles and women as protagonists.

SPAIN

Outlaws by Javier Cercas, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean



A Spanish journalist decides to write a biography about Antonio Gamallo, better known by his nickname of Zarco, a boy from a broken home in a poverty stricken neighborhood who led a gang of teenage bandits in the Catalonian city of Girona in the years immediately following Franco's death in 1975, until he was finally caught and imprisoned after a failed bank robbery. He spent the remainder of his adult life in prison, where he continually tormented his guards and the Spanish legal system as he publicly denounced his lengthy prison sentence in interviews and the two books he wrote. In doing so his case because a cause célèbre throughout Spain, as he brought to light the appalling conditions of Spanish prisons and the harsh sentences that were meted out to poorer Spaniards who could not afford the best legal representatives. Zarco developed a heroin addiction during his wild teenage years, which continued in prison, and it led to his death from AIDS in the early 2000s.

The unnamed journalist decides to interview those who knew Gamallo best, in an effort to distinguish between Antonio, the flawed man, and Zarco, the legendary persona adored by many. His primary source of information is Ignacio Cañas, a well established criminal defense lawyer in Girona. Unbeknownst to most people, Cañas was a member of Zarco's gang in the 1970s, as he was led into it, and out of his comfortable middle class existence, by Zarco and his alluring female companion Tere, but he managed to escape from the police chase that led to Zarco's capture. Cañas became Zarco's defense lawyer more than 20 years after his arrest, on the request of Tere, and the two men resumed their strong yet distant and troubled friendship, as Cañas attempts to gain Zarco's release from prison, and reestablishes his relationship with Tere after his divorce.

Many unanswered questions and mysteries about what happened on the day of Zarco's capture and the events that led up to it have persisted in each of the three main characters' minds for two decades. Each of them holds onto their secrets tightly, and what is divulged to the other two, and ultimately to the journalist, is often dubious and unreliable. In chapters that consist of transcribed interviews of Cañas and others who knew him well, the stories of Zarco, Tere and Cañas. who was known as Gafitas during the time he spent in Zarco's gang, unfold like a matryoshka doll, yet many unanswered questions and the essential truths about Gamallo/Zarco remain elusively out of reach to each of them, and to the journalist.



Similar to Javier Cercas's other novels, Outlaws is based on a real person, in this case Juan José Moreno Cuenca (1961-2003), who led a teenage gang in Barcelona until his capture in the late 1970s. Similar to Zarco, "El Vaquilla", who embodied a generation of Spanish youth lost to heroin in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote two books about his life and imprisonment, Yo, El Vaquilla (I, El Vaquilla) and Hasta la Libertad (Until Freedom) and his life was the basis of the movie Perros Callejeros (Stray Dogs). Numerous songs were written in honor of him after his death as well.

Outlaws is an outstanding page turner of a novel, filled with twists and unexpected revelations around sudden turns in the narrative. Although Zarco is the focus of the book, the lives of Gafitas and Tere are just as captivating, and the mysterious and uncertain relationships between the three held my interest from the first page to the last. In keeping with my other most favorite novels I could easily start reading it again now, and I certainly will do so in the near future.

SPAIN

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal



This novella is set in a small Catalonian town in the early 20th century, narrated by a young woman in a farm town who is sent to live with her childless maternal aunt and her husband as a 13 year old girl. She works hard for them, marries the love of her life, and lives contentedly with her husband, children and her aunt and uncle until tragedy befalls them during the Spanish Civil War.

I found Stone in a Landslide to be an evocative description of life in a small Spanish town, which was well written and mildly interesting but ultimately forgettable.

PORTUGAL

Blank Gaze by José Luís Peixoto (US title: The Implacable Order of Things)

  

I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.

I think: perhaps suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.

This surreal, haunting and bleak novel interspersed with glimpses of tender beauty is set in an unnamed small town in the arid interior region of Alentejo in southern Portugal. Life is a daily battle for its poor residents, who battle poverty and the whims of nature to eke out a hardscrabble existence in a village beset with jealousy, violence and tragedy, with little hope for a better future.

Blank Gaze is centered around several memorable and sometimes fantastic characters over two generations of village life. The most influential character is the devil, who conducts infrequent services and occasional weddings at the abandoned and decrepit town church, while taunting several men in the local bar run by Judas about the infidelities of their wives while the men are working away from home. Gabriel is an ever present 120 year old wise man, whose good advice is rarely followed. Moíses and Elias are Siamese twins joined by a common pinky finger. An old blind prostitute whose mother and grandmother are similarly afflicted services men on a regular basis, and a giant regularly torments a sheepherder and his wife.

The novel consists of snapshots of these characters over a 30+ year period, and consists of third person observations and first person accounts, which resemble haunted confessions by people who are overwhelmed by the untoward events affecting their lives and the ones of those closest to them. Brief periods of tenderness and joy are soon squelched by tragedy, which ultimately consumes everyone, including the devil, under an unforgiving blazing hot sun.

I found Blank Gaze to be a stunning and unforgettable novel, whose rich images outweighed the ethereal portrayals of its characters. Reading this was akin to watching a play on a stage covered in fog, as characters spoke initially hidden from sight, who subsequently appeared and were sometimes different from the one I thought was speaking. Although the points and themes that Peixoto were trying to express eluded me, I enjoyed reading this short book, and I will definitely look for more of his work in the near future.

PORTUGAL

The Education of the Stoic by Fernando Pessoa



This short work is a collection of observations and reflections of life by the Baron of Tieve, the fictional "quasi-author" who contributed to Pessoa's famous novel The Book of Disquiet. The baron was a sensitive and tortured soul, who spent much of his life in solitude and ultimately committed suicide due to his immense unhappiness and inability to find love with a woman. Although this book has a high rating on LT I could not connect with it, as I found the baron's comments to be obtuse, morbid and banal. Your mileage may vary with this one.

SPAIN

The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by David H. Rosenthal

(Original title: La Plaça del Diamant; alternate title: In Diamond Square)



This novel is widely considered to be one of the greatest works of Catalan literature, and an evocative portrait of life in Barcelona during and after the Spanish Civil War. It is set almost entirely in the city's Gràcia neighborhood and is narrated by Natalia, a simple and attractive young woman who works in a small shop there. She lives from day to day, with little concern of her future or the larger world outside of Gràcia, as she is largely unaware of the political turmoil and imminent danger facing the citizens of Barcelona and Catalonia as those loyal to the government and nationalists led by Francisco Franco begin to take sides against each other.

Natalia meets Quimet, a spirited young carpenter, on La Plaça del Diamant, who doggedly pursues and ultimately weds her. The marriage is a not completely blissful one for Natalia, as Quimet is a paternalistic, dismissive and unaffectionate husband, although he is apparently loyal to her and loves the two children she gives them. Quimet insists that raising doves will be their ticket out of poverty, and he builds a dovecote on the top of their apartment to the chagrin of Natalia, as the doves' home comes as the expense of her private work space. She tolerates this intrusion with resentment, which is followed by a surprising act of silent protest.

Quimet joins the Nationalists as war breaks out, and Natalia is left to fend for herself and her children. As the stress of poverty and the uncertainty of Quimet's fate haunts her, she realizes that no one will come to her aid in the besieged city where everyone is struggling to find enough food to eat. At her most desperate moment she is rescued by a kindly older man who takes her and her children under his wing. She is driven nearly to madness, but the experience emboldens and matures her, yet it is one that scars and continues to disturb her for the remainder of the story.

The Time of the Doves is largely narrated by Natalia, in a breathless manner of a woman who is overwhelmed by life, yet manages to overcome obstacles and survive tragedy. Hers is a sad and tragic story, but through it Rodoreda permits the reader a look at the lives of ordinary citizens helplessly caught up in political events, war and its aftermath. I found the first half of the book mildly interesting at best, but the second half was a much more compelling read, as Natalia's personal misfortunes threaten her sanity and the lives of her children. I was sorry to see this novel come to an end, and I will likely get to it again soon, as I suspect that it will be considerably more rewarding on a second reading.

I keep forgetting these regional threads exist, but they are useful as a reference, so here's a quick list of relevant books from 2017:

Q2 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/254171):
El impostor (2014) by Javier Cercas‬ (Spain, 1962- ) - why did a car mechanic pretend to be a concentration-camp survivor?

Q3 (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/260777):
Señas de identidad (1966) by Juan Goytisolo (Spain, 1931-2017) - exile tries to come to terms with Franco's Spain
‪Las leyes de la frontera‪ (2012) by Javier Cercas‬ (Spain, 1962- ) - why did a juvenile delinquent become a lawyer (or vice-versa)?

Shame- have none of us written about Enrique Vila-Matas.

3 of his books come to mind as masterpieces:

Montano's Malady
Bartleby & Co.
Dublinesque

none of you book lovers will be disappointed!

>53 berthirsch: Bartleby & Co. is one of those books you should avoid reading unless you want your TBR pile to grow exponentially. I would never have found out about Robert Walser without it, for instance...

>54 thorold: I did not need to hear that. *Rueful glance at the copy of Bartleby & Co. sitting on my overflowing to-be-read shelf.* But wait! I'm already quite familiar with Robert Walser, does that mean I'm safe?

>55 spiphany:

not safe Vila-Matas will take you on a ride.

Only two relevant books from 2018 (plus a few more Spanish books by Latin American authors). Both highly recommended:

El monarca de las sombras (2017) by Javier Cercas‬ (Spain, 1962- ) (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/293138)
Así empieza lo malo (2014) by Javier Marías (Spain, 1951- ) (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/296979)

...and one from Portugal:
The elephant's journey (2008) by José Saramago (Portugal, 1922-2010) (see also my Club Read thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/289441)

Lord of All the Dead (El monarca de las sombras) by Javier Cercas, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean



My rating:

What I realised was that the protagonist of The Odyssey was the exact opposite of the protagonist of The Iliad: Achilles is the man of a short life and glorious death, who dies at the youthful peak of his beauty and his valour and thus achieves immortality, the man who defeats death through kalos thanatos, a beautiful death that represents the culmination of a beautiful life; Odysseus, on the other hand, is the polar opposite: the man who returns home to live a long life blessed by fidelity to Penelope, to Ithaca and to himself, although in the end he reaches old age and after this life there is no other.

I thought: Uncle Manolo didn't die for his country, Mamá. He didn't die to defend you and your grandmother Carolina and your family. He died for nothing, because they deceived him and made him believe he was defending his interests when he was actually defending other people's interests and that he was risking his life for his own people when he was risking it for others.

In his latest work of auto-fiction, the acclaimed Spanish writer Javier Cercas turns his gaze for the first time on his own family, namely his maternal great-uncle Manuel Mena, who was killed at the age of 19 while fighting for the right wing Falangists in the Battle of Ebro in 1938, during the height of the Spanish Civil War. Manolo's death was and remained devastating to Cercas's mother, and because Mena fought for a group that was later aligned with the fascists led by General Francisco Franco, it proved embarrassing to Cercas and cast a shadow over his life as well.

Javier Cercas was born in Ibahernando, a small village in the autonomous community of Extremadura in western Spain, close to the country's border with Portugal. His mother Blanca met her future husband there, and when he was a child they moved to Girona, a moderate sized city in Catalunya, which suffered greatly for five decades under Franco's rule due to its role in the Republican resistance during the war. The Mena and Cercas families held some degree of status in Ibahernando, although they were far from prosperous, but they were anonymous strangers in Girona, and Blanca could not talk about her beloved uncle Manolo to any of her neighbors, as he was on the "wrong side" of the war.

After resisting repeated requests by his mother and other relatives to investigate Manolo's life and write a book about him, the narrator Javier Cercas ultimately and reluctantly decides to do so, by speaking with his family, visiting Ibahernando, where his mother still had a house, talking with people there who knew his great uncle, and exploring the battle sites where Mena was wounded, along with the former hospital where he died. During his travels Cercas re-reads translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey as a diversion, and in doing so he realizes that his uncle is viewed as a tragic hero by his mother and many older people in Ibahernando, as he was an idealistic young man who was studious and hoped to study law, but chose to postpone his plans to fight with the Falangists against the Second Spanish Republic, in the cause of national unity, order and equality for all Spaniards.

As Cercas slowly uncovers more about Mena from those who knew him best, he learns that, toward the end of his life, Manolo became more disillusioned about the Falangist cause and the great toll that the war was taking on the country. However, he returned to the battlefield one last time, in an act of familial obligation, and was killed shortly afterward in one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

Cercas uses Manolo's death to demonstrate the futility of the Spanish Civil War and most other wars, which have been fought by untold millions of young men and women who gave their lives not for freedom or better lives for themselves, their families and their neighbors, but rather for the wealthy and powerful, whose massive egos on both sides of this war led to hundreds of thousands of deaths that ultimately benefitted no one save for Franco, the fascist leadership, and the Generalíssimo's most loyal supporters.

The ultimate question that Cercas struggles to answer is: "What is a hero?" Did Manolo act heroically in fighting alongside the Falangists? Was his death in vain? Did his family or community benefit from his sacrifice? Is it better to be Achilles, the lord of all the dead, who is celebrated by many but whose life is cut short before he can fully enjoy it, or Odysseus, who returns from battle to lead a long but mediocre life?

I found Lord of All the Dead to be a thought provoking novel, which was a bit of a slog at times in the overly detailed descriptions of battles that Manuel Mena fought in, but the analysis of his life at the end was very well done, as were the descriptions of Cercas's mother, his family, the few remaining residents of Ibahernando, and himself. The book isn't as much of a page turner as his two most recent novels, Outlaws and The Impostor, were, but it was ultimately very rewarding and did provide much food for thought, about the Spanish Civil War, postwar and post-Franco Spain, war in general, and the present political climate in the western world.

Midway through Emilia Pardo Bazán’s brilliant 1886 novel The House of Ulloa, a member of the decayed Galician landed gentry and his new bride visit an even grander and more decrepit family and mansion, and when the bride is offered seating in the alarming-looking drawing room, the worm- and insect-eaten ceremonial chair crumbles to dust beneath her.

Now this is the power of fiction in a nutshell. You should have heard my intake of breath. I might add that Spanish fiction of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, so neglected in the English-speaking world, abounds in moments of such force.

I have a bit of a problem now, though. Pardo Bazán wrote a sequel to this novel, Mother Nature (La madre naturaleza), which was translated and published by Bucknell University Press in 2010. There is no paperback or ebook. The list price of the hardcover is $114.00. Amazon has it new for $85.65; the cheapest price in the used book market appears to be $71.70.

Now I ask you, is this kind of punitive pricing any way to treat lovers of literature? I could see Bucknell slapping a $35.00 or even $45.00 price on the hardcover, with a paperback at 2/3 of that, but $114.00 is just ridiculous.

I am eager to read the sequel, but at these prices I simply don’t have access to it, and living outside the US, inter-library loan is not an option. I wish my reading in Spanish were up to tackling the original text, which I could have at a reasonable price, but I’m not quite that advanced.

Ah well, I guess the book just goes on my long “Challenges to Obtain” list.