'Liveforever' by Andrés Caicedo (Review)

Maybe/ I don't really wanna know/ how your garden grows/ 'Cos I just wanna fly
While the title of today's book immediately brings a certain band to mind for my generation, we're actually travelling a little further afield than Manchester.  Almost twenty years before Liam Gallagher sang those words, in Colombia a young writer was putting pen to paper on a work which was to sear his name into the country's literary history - and yes, it's all about the music...

*****
Andrés Caicedo's short novel Liveforever (translated by Frank Wynne, review copy courtesy of Penguin Classics) is a pulsating, energy-laden work which thrusts the reader into a world of drugs, violence and music (oh yes, lots of music).  It's set in Cali, Colombia, between 1973 and 1974, and is the story of a generation doomed to failure.  There'll be no fading away here, though - these are the kind of kids who like to burn out, often spectacularly...

Our guide through the world of salsa and rumbas is María del Carmen Huerta, a respectable, intelligent, beautiful middle-class teenager, growing up in Cali.  One day, though, she decides it's time to break free of her bourgeois upbringing and explore the world of music.  It proves to be a fateful decision:

"Every life hinges on the course we decide to take at one precise, privileged moment.  On that Saturday in August I broke with my routine, and the same night I ended up at Skinny Flores's 'rumba'.  It was a simple decision, but one that would have extraordinary consequences.  One of them is that I now find myself here, safe in this haven of night, telling my story, shorn of all social standing and the crass manners I was raised with.  No doubt I'll be held up as an example.  'Peace and goodwill over my land'."
p.29 (Penguin Modern Classics, 2014)

This one night, a frantic escape into music, is to set the course for her future.  Once she's made the decision to venture into the night, there's no going back.

Liveforever could be described as the story of María's descent into an underworld of drugs and debauchery.  Caicedo, using the voice of María herself, relates detailed descriptions of drug use, hedonism and week-long parties, and we see the youths of the street crumble into pieces, drained by music and drugs:

"Music that feeds on live flesh, music that leaves you with nothing but blisters, music hot off the wax, that's what I want, what I live for; bring it on, sap my energy if you can, turn my values on their head, let me founder, abandon me to criminality, because I don't know anything any more..." (p.115)

This is a generation that will most definitely die before it gets old...

When night falls (as it does, suddenly and brutally, at 6 p.m.), the languid behaviour of the hot day gives way to an outpouring of carnal energy, a situation María quickly comes to terms with:

"So what if I grabbed the night by the balls, so what if I broke its spirit, wore it out and drained it dry?  At least I was still standing: not like the men, who drop like flies." (p.5)

It's then that we see the city come to life, as María pulls us in her magical wake from rumba to rumba, looking for parties, hunting down the music.  Sure, we get to dance, but death and destruction is left in our wake.

Yet that's not how it is for María herself.  Beautiful and vibrant, with the face (and hair) of a goddess, she becomes a focal point of the nocturnal community, the heart of the dance.  She looks damned good on the dancefloor, and she knows it (so does everyone else); in fact, there's something, magical, mystical about her.  In the blonde-haired dancing diva from the right side of town, the street boys find someone to worship.

Worship of this kind is not without its dangers, though, and María is a goddess of the most pagan kind; the music may feed on live flesh, but so does our María.  She's a dangerous woman, a Colombian femme fatale, the flame into which the moth-like youths who surround her at the rumbas cannot help but fly. Like a Latina Medusa, or siren, she inflicts wounds on men, her hair slicing cuts in the soul of any man who moves into her orbit, cuts they cherish when they're coming down after the long night.  Each man that she encounters is entranced by her spell, but ends up wasted, worn, spat out and humbled - she sucks their spirit dry, then moves onto the next.  One night in Cali can make any man humble, hard or otherwise.

The whole book is like one long, pulsating dance, a hypnotic, spell-binding, energy-sapping tribute to music.  María needs music, she senses it, hunts it down, then, when she finds a worthy gathering, a rumba with feeling, she uses the men she meets to absorb it.  From her childhood friend Ricardito, she receives the gift of translated English lyrics, from the red-headed gringo Leopoldo Brook, live music, pulsing and throbbing, from Rubén Paces, lessons in the history of salsa...

...and they all come to a sad end (just stayin' alive is a feat in the underworld of Cali...).  María seems less a woman at times than a force of nature, the goddess of the dark dance, music incarnate.  With Colombian music interfused with African rhythms and pagan language, it's tempting to see her as something otherworldly, a succubus, a wraith...

As you might have realised, this is a book I loved, devouring it in a matter of hours.  The writing is wonderful, with the frantic energy of the voices and the ceaseless, constant twisting of direction, the language is heavily descriptive, attacking the reader's senses with colours, textures, emotions - we can feel the rhythm, smell the sweat, hear the music...  The text is intermingled with song lyrics, half prose, half music, our journey through the world of salsa...

Spare a thought then for the poor translator...  In addition to having to transport Caicedo's dazzling words into English, Wynne also had to identify the lyrics embedded in the prose and make it clear for the Anglophone readers who (as he points out in his Translator's Note) are hardly "...likely to have an in-depth knowledge of salsa and the many related styles of Afro-Cuban music..." (p.xviii).  Poor Frank - I can imagine the time and energy that must have gone into this translation.  Perhaps his wonderful rendering into English comes at the cost of becoming María's latest victim...

In short, Liveforever is a wonderful book - I'd say I'm surprised that it hasn't appeared in English before, but, let's face it, I'm not (I've been in the game of reviewing translated fiction for far too long for things like that to surprise me...).  For those who want to know more about Caicedo though, this, sadly, is just about it.  On the day, he received a copy of the book, he killed himself, overdosing on pills, a sad post-script to his work.

The story, though, lives on, as does the music, and while I prefer the poignant English title, the original is probably a little more apt.  You see, in Spanish the book is called ¡Que viva la música!, which translates to something like 'Long Live Music!'.  This seems a fitting epitaph for the book as we leave María to her life in Cali, with the music beating on into eternity.  You see, you simply can't stop the music - nobody can stop the music...

'The Sound of Things Falling' by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Review - IFFP 2013, Number 5)

After recapping the books already finished, it's now time to get into the rest of the IFFP longlist.  The first stop on the journey takes us to Colombia - where a chance encounter proves to be life-changing for a young academic...

***** 
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated by Anne McLean - from Bloomsbury)
What's it all about?
The novel begins in 2009, with law professor Antonio Yammara looking back at an event which, while innocuous at the time, turned out to be a pivotal moment in his life.  A chance meeting with Ricardo Laverde in a billiard hall eventually leads to an attack by a gunman on a motorbike, in the course of which Laverde is killed and Yammara is badly injured.

Once Antonio has recovered physically from the attack, he feels compelled to find out more about Laverde (and hopefully discover who killed him, and why).  One lead is information he obtains about the death of Laverde's estranged wife, Elaine; however, it isn't until he receives an unexpected phone call from Laverde's daughter that things slowly start to fall into place...

The Sound of Things Falling is an oblique look at the effects of the Colombian drug wars of the 1980s, not on those who were on the front line of the battle, but on the average citizen who lived their life against a background of fear.  Antonio suffers from trauma after the shooting, but his issues are much more deep-seated.  Having spent his formative years enveloped by the turmoil on the streets of Bogotá, he is unable to simply let things go - and his wife (who spent much of her youth outside Colombia) is unable to understand his pain.

His quixotic journey to confront the past is an attempt to move forward by banishing his demons, and the opportunity provided by Laverde's daughter, Maya, is irresistible.  Maya is able to fill in some of the pieces in the puzzle posed by Laverde's murder, but her appeal is just as much due to what she shares with Antonio.  She too grew up during the drug wars and has a special aversion to the capital:

"But that was seven years ago," I said.  "You haven't been back to Bogotá in all those years?"
"Well, yes.  To see the lawyers.  To look for that woman, Consuelo Sandoval.  But I've never stayed overnight in Bogotá, or even until sundown.  I can't stand it, I can't endure more than a few hours there."
p.110 (Bloomsbury, 2012)

Like Antonio, Maya is scarred by the events of her youth.  It is almost inevitable that the two traumatised souls will feel a connection...

The novel is also largely concerned with stories.  The structure is one of those Russian-doll affairs, with Antonio talking to the reader from 2009 before rapidly going back to 1995 to describe his first meeting with Laverde.  Of course, we have to take Antonio's descriptions at face value - which may not be such a good idea:

"Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't have then, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.)"  p.15

When we move deeper into the novel and enter the core of Elaine's story, cobbled together from letters, diaries and Maya's stories, the reader needs to tread even more carefully.  Stories, and memories, are not always reliable.

There is a lot to like about The Sound of Things Falling.  McLean's translation reads wonderfully, keeping the hint of a Hispanic narrator while creating an excellent English text (if that is at all possible!), and the book zips along at times, the darker parts nicely counterbalanced with lighter moments (such as Elaine's letter in which she complains about a tedious book in difficult Spanish where all the characters have the same names...).  All in all, it's a quick, enjoyable read with the hint of something more...

...and I haven't even mentioned the hippopotamus ;)

Does it deserve to make the shortlist?
Despite the positive comments above, I'd have to say no.  While I liked it, I don't think it was really anything special, and one of the main issues I had was with the middle section.  Elaine's story seemed to drag, a dutiful narrative which slowed the book right down.  By the time we returned to the central question of who had killed Ricardo and why, I'd forgotten that this was the focus of the novel...

Will it make the shortlist?
Possibly.  It's definitely not a bad book, and as one of the few works from outside Europe, it provides a point of difference in a fairly homogeneous selection.  I also suspect other readers will be a lot more forgiving than me :)

*****
That's all for today :)  Next time, we're off to Norway - BYO cleaning products (I'll explain later...).

Food for Thought

Music, as Shakespeare once remarked, may well be the food of love, but the art of feeding our other emotions is not quite so well known.  What should you eat if you want to assuage your jealousy?  What foods are good for staving off loneliness?  Is there a culinary cure for sadness?  Well, dear reader, if you have ever been bothered by these kinds of questions, today is your lucky day, for I have just the book for you :)

The work in question is Colombian writer Hector Abad's Recipes for Sad Women (translated by Anne McLean), a slender volume kindly sent to me by the wonderful Pushkin Press.  To call it a novel, or even a novella, would be slightly misleading; the book is a collection of recipes collected by an unnamed narrator, promising to solve the problems of any woman who happens to come across the pages.

Right from the start, the writer warns us of the limitations of his culinary arts.  His first words are:

"Nobody knows the recipe for happiness.  At the moment of misfortune the most elaborate stews of satisfaction will be in vain." p.15 (Pushkin Press, 2012)

In fact, he believes that sadness is an important part of life:

"You tumble and flip, bodily and in your imagination, to elude sadness.  But who said you are not allowed to be sad?  In reality, there is often nothing more sensible than being sad..." p.18

However, when it comes to certain other emotions, he has some tried and trusted recipes which will both ease the mind and the stomach.

A good way to loosen other people's lips is a steak, cooked elaborately and following the writer's instructions to the letter.  The key to a sleep full of exhilarating dreams is a highly complex onion soup.  If you're looking for a good laugh, Abad recommends mammoth steaks.  While they are (for obvious reasons) difficult to come by, three times out of four hilarity will ensue - unfortunately, the fourth time brings diarrhoea and vomiting instead...

If this was all the book had to offer, then Recipes for Sad Women would quickly descend into a one-joke work.  However, there's a lot more to Abad's creation than that.  It's actually a collection of philosophical musings accompanied by culinary tips, a guide to the inner workings of the soul with advice on what to eat while working through your emotions.  Each of the recipes is a self-contained nugget of wisdom, some spread over a few pages, others rather shorter.  For example:

"Often, on the brink of finding the recipe for immortality, I get distracted by the frightful presence of death." p.44

Yep, that's the whole page...

While many of the recipes are largely concerned with savouring the full flavour of life (and many of those deal with getting the most out of your love life...), there is also an underlying tone of sadness - and death.  Abad attempts to teach the reader (for we are all sad women in his eyes) how to cope with loss, either of a temporary or a permanent nature.  When you learn that the writer was forced to flee his home country after his father was murdered by paramilitaries, it puts the book into focus.  Abad never writes with bitterness, but there is an air of sadness, of someone who has been through the highs and lows of life and now wishes to help guide others through their troubles.

It's not all depressing though.  A quick leaf through the pages will provide you with a whole range of ideas to incorporate into your daily life.  There's something for everyone in these pages, whether you want to know if routine is a good or bad thing, or whether you need to learn how to adjust to a change in your environment.  The writer has some hints for every situation - just don't blame him if the meal doesn't always turn out as planned...

I read the book through over a couple of days, and it was pleasant reading, but I'm not sure that this is how it should be experienced.  Recipes for Sad Women is one of those books that, like poetry, should be dipped into on occasions, each fragrant spoonful of advice carefully tasted, judged and digested before the next one is brought to the table.  In fact, don't take my word for it, listen to Abad:

"Delightful morsels do not only please the belly - they calm the spirit and therefore allow reasonable portions." p.108

So please give Recipes for Sad Women a taste - just don't be a glutton ;)

The City of the Dead

It's week four of Spanish Lit Month, and that means that I have the fourth of my reviews to delight you with today - and it's another intriguing one.  When I requested a review copy of Lorenzo Mediano's The Frost on his Shoulders from Europa Editions, I was lucky enough to be offered another Spanish-language book to review, Santiago Gamboa's Necropolis (translated by Howard Curtis) - an offer I couldn't refuse ;)

*****
Necropolis begins with a famous writer living in Rome, who is recovering from a lengthy illness.  One day, he unexpectedly receives an invitation to speak at a conference in Jerusalem, from an organisation he has never heard of, on a topic on which he is far from being an expert.  His interest is further piqued by the generous remuneration offered and the fascinating variety of invitees, including an ex-con, a porn star and a stamp collector (now why don't I get invited to conferences like that?), and before long he is on a plane making its way to Israel.

When he arrives, Jerusalem is a city under siege, and the conference is held against a constant backdrop of gunfire and explosions.  In the middle of the chaos, the delegates continue with their talks on the theme of words and biographies, with one of the most successful being that told by José Maturana, a former convict and murderer who turned to religion after an encounter with a charismatic preacher.  However, just hours after his contribution to the conference, he is found dead in his hotel room - suicide?  Possibly...

The previous two paragraphs give you a rough idea of the background of Necropolis, but they don't tell you just how extraordinary the book actually is.  While the story starts plainly enough in the words of the writer (presumably a variation on Gamboa himself), it then becomes intermingled with chapters detailing Maturana's life story.  Once we get into the second section, one third of the book is devoted to three more stories told by the delegates, none of which appear to move the story on at all.  It's only when we get to the final section that some of the relevance of these tales become apparent - but only some.

The conference is all about life stories, and a major theme in Necropolis is the twisting and intermingling of stories and life.  This idea is foregrounded right from the start when the writer is choosing some books to take with him to the conference:

"...I started to wonder if those written lives were real or if their only reality was in the writing itself, the fact that they had been turned into words, into filled pages destined for people almost as desperate as themselves..." p.29 (Europa Editions, 2012)

His musings about the blurred line between real life and what gets written down about it set the scene for the way we need to approach the many stories we experience later in Jerusalem...

The one story that we have to analyse in detail is that of the unfortunate Maturana.  When we first hear it, spread over three chapters sandwiching the writer's experiences at the conference, it sounds plausible enough, the story of a man redeemed by a modern saint who himself turned out to be fragile and only too human.  However, once he is dead, the writer (and the reader!) is able to hear several different sides to the story, forcing him to use his judgement as to how 'true' each of them is. 

The only thing we can be sure of is that when a story is told, we are learning what the storyteller wants us to hear.  Some of the stories are deliberately shocking, using brutal 'honesty' to win over the audience; others are deliberately underplayed, hoping to make the reader respect the speaker's intelligence; others, perhaps, are not quite as based in reality as they are made out to be - the line between fiction and biography is a rather unclear one...

Necropolis is another excellent, fascinating piece of Spanish-language literature, but I did have a couple of issues with the book.  While the various stories were excellent, and an integral part of the book, I did find that they distanced me a little from the core narrative.  On finishing a chapter (and most of them were fairly lengthy), I rarely felt like immediately pushing on with the book - the self-contained nature of the sections often left me treating Necropolis as a collection of short stories rather than a novel.

A much bigger issue though was one which, in some ways, is coming to typify my Latin-American reading experience.  Throughout Necropolis, there is a sense of machismo which is hard to ignore, no matter how related it is to the story.  Women only appear to exist as sexual objects, with none of the female characters (with the possible exception of the porn star...) coming across as real people, and the stories contain references aplenty to prostitutes, orgies and rape.

While some of the context justifies it, I thought that it went a little overboard at times, and the character of Marta, a highly-sexed Icelandic journalist who is a walking cliché of Nordic sexual attitudes is one that pushed things a little too far for me.  There's no doubt that there is a purpose behind the sensationalism, and I'm sure that the idea of making the most of life in a city where bombs are falling would explain some of this away, but I'm not sure that everyone would buy into these excuses.

Despite these misgivings though, I thoroughly enjoyed Necropolis and would recommend it.  Just as in last week's offering, Dublinesque, the expected separation of life and fiction is playfully tampered with, forcing us to look forwards, backwards and outside the text to fully understand it.  What we come away with is an understanding that each story is special in its own way, regardless of who it's about or what that person has achieved.  As Gamboa says:

"What there is at the end of a life is irrelevant, it isn't the result that makes a life exceptional, but the path trodden..." p.162

Something to ponder as we go about making our own life stories... 

Review Post 23 - Short Men

Must be the year of the novella. I started the year with three short works in three days, and it seems to have rolled on nicely from there, with several more books of less than 150 pages read to date. Of course, my new, lazier blogging regime has had a little to do with that. Last year, when I was typing out a full review for every book I read, reading this many novellas would have resulted in the little-known medical condition of Sensory Post Overload Tension Syndrome (SPOTS) as I struggled feverishly to review each one in the style it craved and deserved. believe me, it's not pretty.

Anyway, here are some choice thoughts about two slight works by a couple of wonderful writers. Short ones, of course.

*****

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold (translated into English by Gregory Rabassa) is apparently a reconstruction of an event from the writer's youth and recounts the death of Santiago Nasar, victim of an 'honour killing' in a small Colombian town. The reader knows Nasar's fate right from the start, and it's only a few pages until we know who carried out the murder - and the reason for it. The beauty of this novella is not in the who and what, but in the how and why, and the way the author unwraps his story, layer by layer, like a beautifully wrapped Christmas present, is a joy to behold. The journalistic approach adopted by the writer reminds me of Heinrich Böll's Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, but where Böll's work was taut, aggressive and detached, GGM is an integral part of the mazy, rambling story, one of the many extras roaming the streets (and slipping in and out of bed with the madam of the local brothel, not something you often find chroniclers doing).

The story slips back and forth in time, meandering occasionally, before being gently guided back into the semblance of a linear tale. Great care is taken with painting the people populating the story, to the extent of adding interesting details about the most minor of characters (such as a policemen who we learn "...died the following year, gored in the jugular vein by a bull during the national holidays."). In fact, the victim himself seems to be less important than the host of bystanders who look on guiltily or try to find the unfortunate Santiago to warn him of his fate.

You see, by the time of the murder, virtually everyone in the town knows that it is going to happen, with the notable exception of the victim. His murderers, damned to avenge their sister's honour, but hopeful that someone may still prevent them from doing it, tell all and sundry of their intentions. Santiago's friends scour the streets, trying to find him and warn him before it's too late; the police and the priest are informed and several steps are taken to prevent the tragedy from taking place. As we know from page one of the book, somehow they are all unsuccessful.

Less a story than the tale of an old man on a search for an elusive truth, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a wonderful piece of writing and well worth reading. As with most novellas though, whether it is worth buying is another matter. I devoured the 122 pages of large type in one sitting, and I am very glad that Narre Warren Library had a copy on the shelf...

*****

The wonderful people at the library had also decided to stock up on V.S. Naipaul, and this book would have been worth purchasing. The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book and Other Comic Inventions is an omnibus containing a collection of short stories and two novellas: The Suffrage of Elvira (which I read last month) and Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion.

Mr. Stone... is an early work by the Trinidad-born Nobel Laureate, which takes place in London in the 1960s. Richard Stone is a lifelong bachelor, nearing retirement, who, after meeting a widow at a friend's dinner party, somehow finds himself married a few months later. Thrown by his change in circumstances, and haunted by a chance encounter which leads him to consider his upcoming retirement, he throws himself into the development of an idea for his work which will have ramifications for everyone in his life: the Knights Companion...

This novella started off as a short story but eventually became too long and was published in its own right, and, for the first half at least, it seemed like a concept extended beyond its natural life. The idea appeared a little drawn out, and I had trouble seeing where the story was going. Eventually though, as Stone stops fighting against the unfairness in the world and the appropriation of his ideas at work, he starts to regain his equilibrium and seeks comfort in the natural world, his garden and the once-hated cat from next door. This sketching of the inner life of an elderly gentleman is one of Naipaul's strengths. Just as he does in A House for Mr. Biswas, here he draws out the inner dignity of a powerless man, surrounded by women at home and eclipsed by pushier, more cunning colleagues in the work environment.

By the end of the novella, the circle of life has turned again. Stone has retired, the trees are in bloom, and a familiar pair of eyes greet him on his return to his little house. Despite the changes around him, the elderly man now feels comfortable with his life again. It's a charming tale, but one that whets the appetite rather than sates it. After reading three of his earlier works this year, I feel ready to move on to some of his later, more famous novels now. Who knows, I may even buy them...

44 - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Last year I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera', Garcia Marquez's novel of a love story in old age, so I thought I knew roughly what 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' would be like. As it turns out, I was ever so slightly wrong... The casual prose dragging the reader languidly through decades in the life of its protagonists was the same; however, the content, while still set in Latin America and dealing with love, lust and family life, was, to put it mildly a bit different.

In my last post, I compared Nick Earls' short stories to Haruki Murakami's novels in the way that the everyday is described in great detail while being peppered by events which are slightly less real; little did I know that this style of writing ('magical realism') was coined to describe the work of South American novelists like Garcia Marquez. From flying carpets whizzing past the window to four-and-a-half-year rainstorms, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' has something for everyone without turning into a fantasy book, and the reader can accept these abnormal occurrences without it affecting the enjoyment of the story.

At the centre of the book is the tempestuous Buendia clan, whose patriarch, Jose Arcadio, strikes out from his hometown with his wife, Ursula, in an attempt to escape the ghost of a man he killed, and founds the town of Macondo in an uninhabited part of his country. A century later, after walking the reader through the experiences of the children, grand-children, friends, concubines, lovers, partners and animals of what, at times, is a hugely powerful and culturally dominating family, the book ends with the disappearance of all that has gone before and the town's return to its earlier obscurity.

The Buendia family are a collection of larger-than-life characters, from Jose Arcadio and the long-lived Ursula, to their sons Aureliano and Jose Arcadio and a whole host of their descendants, many of whom share their forefather's names. The men of the family, often divided over the six featured generations into the calm, calculating Aurelianos and the aggressive, hard-living Jose Arcadios, build, fight, whore and die; the women, most of whom marry into the family, are either scheming, tenacious and hard as nails, or beautiful and somewhat detached. Over and over again, names are handed down, children are brought up, and the same mistakes are made. Although it seems as if the Buendias are merely a victim of circumstances, we finally find out that their rise and fall has been predicted all along.

Despite the size of the Buendia family, theirs is not a house of laughter and love (although a theme of barely suppressed and finally unwtting incest runs through the tale), with many of the family members preferring to keep themselves to themselves, some to the extent of locking themselves in a small room for years at a time. The solitude of the title refers to the lack of support for each other and the looseness of the ties which would normally bind a family together. While the women do try to keep the family (and the house, a symbol of the family) together, time eventually defeats them all, and everything returns to its natural state.

However, the solitude refers not only to the Buendias, but also to Macondo, the town which the original Jose Arcadio founded. The completely new town gradually grows and becomes more and more important owing to Aureliano's role in the country's political wars, finally becoming a centre of commerce with links to the outside world by road and rail. However, as time passes, so do the temporary riches; the outsiders leave again, the buildings crumble, and the town is once more isolated from the rest of civilisation. In the space of the hundred years of the title, the town is born, expands, is ruined and disappears.

The book ends in a whirlwind of emotions (amongst other things...), and it takes a while for the dust to (literally) settle on what has happened and to think about what the whole point of the book was. One rather obvious one is, as was discussed in Sophocles' famous plays, check your girlfriend's birth certificate (just to make sure that the names on it aren't the same as the ones on yours); the story begins and ends, and largely hinges on, incest and its consequences. Another one is slightly more palatable but no less important; nothing lasts forever. Just as civilisations rise and fall and football teams go from losers to champions to idiots again, the fortunes of people and places can move in cycles, swinging between famous highs and ignominious lows. It's something we should all be wary of at the time of our great successes. Time and fortune may lift us up, but they can always send us crashing back to earth.