'Rain Over Madrid' by Andrés Barba (Review)

Despite the best worst combined efforts of Royal Mail and Australia Post, I recently received some more reading fare from the wonderful Hispabooks.  The first of the three is by a writer who was included in Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue, a man whose sentences flow smoothly and whose stories entertain and intrigue.  So, without further ado, let's take a trip to Spain...

*****
Andrés Barba's Rain Over Madrid (translated by Lisa Dillman) is a collection of four novellas running to just over two-hundred pages.  Each takes place in the Spanish capital, and the stories are mostly about people coming to terms with love and family - fairly commonplace topics, but handled nicely.

The first piece, 'Fatherhood' sees a semi-successful musician becoming a father when his rich girlfriend unexpectedly falls pregnant.  While the relationship with the mother is fairly shortlived, he realises that fatherhood is something that lasts forever:

"It seemed then, for the first time, that a sort of transference took place; he didn't know how else to explain it - a boundless well of emotion, and also pain at the fact that intimacy and natural behaviour were not possible between them.  Until that moment, he'd only ever sensed it in the vaguest of ways, but now it seemed undeniable."
'Fatherhood', p.33 (Hispabooks, 2014)

The story extends over several years, with Barba chronicling the man's attempt to stay close to the boy he rarely sees.  Will he ever be able to break through the barrier of politeness separating them?

The other stories then move on to see matters through the eyes of women.  In 'Guilt', a married woman is forced to act as the focal point for her family, with matters coming to a head when she is forced to look for (yet another) live-in home help for her ageing, cantankerous mother.  The main character of 'Fidelity', by contrast, is a teenage girl discovering sex for the first time and generally having a wonderful time.  However, her summer in the sun turns a little sour when she finds out that she's not the only one in her family having some fun.

The final piece, 'Shopping', follows a woman approaching middle age and her glamorous mother, Nelly.  This is no maternal figure, rather a whirlwind in Prada, and her idea of being 'natural' is not what the daughter would hope for:

"Not so for Nelly.  Nelly is natural like a typhoon is natural, like all self-centered egotists, like a disaster, like the Grand Canyon, like a luxury item ensconced in an absurdly minimalist display case in a glittery shop window."
'Shopping', p.171

As they go shopping in the snow for Christmas presents, the daughter sees chinks in her mother's armour for the first time, making it easier for her to make allowances for Nelly's bossy behaviour.  After all, everyone gets old...

Rain Over Madrid is an enjoyable read with four excellent stories.  Despite the extended time span of the first two stories, it almost seems as if the book is divided into seasons, as we move from the eternal spring of 'Fatherhood', to the winter streetscape of 'Shopping'.  Each story looks at a moment of realisation, a time when a life changes direction.  Not all of the turning points are dramatic, but they're all important in their own way.

The protagonists (mostly written in the first person) struggle with relationships, and each must deal with big personalities in their lives, whether they be lovers, sisters, fathers or mothers.  Introverts for the most part, yet desiring emotion and human contact, the central characters are confronted by people who are completely self-absorbed and self-obsessed.  In order to get what they want from their relationships, Barba's creations must make an effort to assert themselves, even though it may seem easier at times to just go with the flow.

The stories are written in an excellent style, calm, casual and very easy to read.  I enjoyed Dillman's work with the translation as the stories flow nicely.  There are no jarring tones, and the dialogue and description are seamlessly integrated, making for an excellent read.  There are a few obvious Americanisms, but you can't have everything, especially when the translator comes from the States ;)

Rain Over Madrid is another enjoyable work from Hispabooks, and it's definitely a book many will enjoy.  The four stories are interesting, very accessible and easy to read in a single setting, despite their length - hopefully this bodes well for getting more from Barba into English soon :)

'The Adventures of Shola' by Bernardo Atxaga (Review)

After the positive reception of Emily's first review last month, we thought that we'd try looking at another book together, and today's choice is a further offering from Pushkin Children's Books.  The writer and translator, once again, are very familiar names - the star of the show, however, is a little hairier than last time around ;)

*****
What's the name of the book, and who is it by?
The name of the book is The Adventures of Shola, and it's by Bernardo Atxaga.

What's it about?
It's about a dog called Shola and her owner, Señor Grogo.  Shola is no ordinary dog.  She likes going on adventures, maybe she is a 'rara avis' (laughs).  She's a little white dog, and she has lots and lots of adventures, like going on a wild boar hunt and being a lioness!

Did you like it?  Why (not)?
I liked two of the stories, but I didn't like the other two stories as much.  They were just a little bit boring because there wasn't much excitement in them.  I liked the other stories better because they have lots of excitement, and Shola is on the run!

What was your favourite story?  Why?
'Shola and the Aunt from America', because it was very funny.  In this story, Señor Grogo's aunt is coming over from America, and Shola thinks she is going to be a rude, nasty cowgirl, but she is a 'no-leaded dogs person', so Shola is very surprised about her reaction of being free.  Shola cannot believe that the aunt from America threw away her lead.

I also liked 'Shola and the Wild Boar'.  It was full of excitement, and Shola was the smallest dog, but she was the bravest of all.  Even though they didn't even see a real wild boar, it was a terrifying hunt!

Was it difficult to read?
Maybe the words on the TV show 'Live in the Park' (in the 'Shola and the Aunt from America' story), like 'rara avis' and 'discombobulated', were a bit tricky.  The rest of the book was easy to read, and I liked the colourful pictures.  My favourite picture was of the American aunt :)

Would you recommend this book to other boys and girls?  Why (not)?
It would be a good book for dog-lovers and anyone who likes crazy things!

Emily, thank you very much :)

*****
Our second choice from the Pushkin Children's range is another by a high-profile team.  The writer is Bernardo Atxaga, a Basque author well known for his adult books (e.g. Seven Houses in France) while the translator (from Atxaga's own Spanish translation) is one of the biggest names in the game, the wonderful Margaret Jull Costa (translator of, among many others, Javier Marías and José Saramago).  There is a third member of the team too, illustrator Mikel Valverde, and his wonderful colourful drawings are an integral part of the stories, allowing us to see the fearless Shola in all her glory.

The four stories were originally released individually, and this collection is a wonderful book, a beautiful hardback edition running to more than two-hundred pages.  Some of the vocabulary might be a little tricky for younger readers (even the intrepid Emily), but there's always the option of reading the book to your child yourself.  I suspect I might try reading one of the stories to her over a few evenings to see if it works better that way...

So, another great children's book, and a further insight into what kids overseas are reading (or having read to them).  I wonder what else we can find to entertain Miss Emily with?  Hopefully, it won't be too long until we get back to you with the next instalment of her adventures in translated fiction :)

'Antón Mallick Wants to Be Happy' by Nicolás Casariego (Review)

Some of you will have seen the recent posts on my visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and as I said in the first of those posts, the main reason I went was to catch up with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego to hear what he had to say about his first novel in English.  Casariego turned out to be a nice, happy sort of man, which was good to see - especially as his creation is anything but...

*****
Antón Mallick Wants to Be Happy (translated by Thomas Bunstead, review copy courtesy of Hispabooks) is written in the form of the diary in which a thirty-two-year-old Spanish lawyer decides that the time has come for him to set depression and pessimism to one side:

"Enough is enough.  I don't want to be a pessimist, or a victim, any more.  I reject the status of black hole.  This notebook, which I address and dedicate to Vidor Mallick, inveterate gambler and amateur loan shark, is proof of my will to optimism, that is, my great desire to become a man with a sunny disposition, happy, normal, one of those guys who springs out of bed every morning and has answers for pretty much every single one of life's many questions."
p.11 (Hispabooks, 2014)

A noble ambition indeed, but what can Antón do to achieve this goal?  And, more importantly, why does he feel the need for this radical step?

In pursuit of optimism and happiness, Antón decides to begin the search in books, and his family is happy to help out: elder brother Zoltan provides an armful of self-help tomes while younger sister Bela points him in the direction of the classic philosophers.  However, with family disputes and a major contract to work on, finding enlightenment isn't going to be easy.  And then, of course, there's the small matter of a woman who claims to be the mother of his unborn child...

Right from the start, Antón Mallick... was a book that just clicked with me, and I greatly enjoyed the time I spent in the world of the confused Spaniard.  What Casariego offers the reader is a picture of a man who understands that he isn't happy and has decided to do something about it.  First, though, he has to understand what exactly this elusive ideal he's chasing is, and he quickly realises that happiness is far easier to talk about than to identify:

"...happiness can be everywhere, except right here, the one place in which you and I find ourselves.  It is therefore, an invention, an imaginary refuge, a mirage in the middle of the desert, and it vanishes the moment you get close." (p.190)

As Antón progresses in his search for happiness, both in his reading and (mis)adventures outside his apartment, the reader feels sympathy for his hopeless cause.

As mentioned above, Antón isn't completely alone in his quest as his brother and sister are keen to offer bibliographic support; however, Zoltan and Bela aren't exactly models of happiness themselves.  The brother is a psychologist, one whose professional exterior hides a slightly disturbing character, while Antón's intelligent, charming sister is trapped in a stifling relationship with a lazy American 'writer'.  In fact, the only happy member of the family seems to be the Vidor Mallick Antón mentions in his diary entry.  It's a shame, then, that Vidor, supposed author of the book Confessions of a Once-Hungarian Spaniard, has been dead for well over a century...

Part of the success of the book is the way in which Casariego constructs his novel, using Antón's diary entries to both inform and deceive the reader.  It's a sort of therapy, and it's very easy to fall into the trap of trusting Señor Mallick and taking his assertions at face value.  However, in reality (as Casariego mentioned during his talk at the festival), the diary format allows Antón (and the writer) to be a little economical with the truth.  The careful reader will see contradictions and sense certain omissions, some (but not all) of which will make sense later in the novel.

The diary format in itself could get a little old very quickly, but the writer mixes things up by including several other text types.  In addition to Antón's thoughts on the books he's reading (sometimes considered, occasionally flippant and insulting), we see copies of e-mails, transcriptions of conversations on Skype and an unusual take on the life story of a Soviet satellites expert.  It does make sense, I promise.  Sort of...

Tony Messenger, over at the Messengers Booker blog, recently posted on this book and was a lot less enamoured with it, not even managing to get half-way through the novel.  However, while I can see why he didn't like it (it was around this point in the story that I had a few doubts myself), I think a lot of the flaws he pointed out were actually deliberate.  Antón is meant to be an unreliable narrator, and many of the more absurd plot developments are mere distractions, taking both the narrator and reader further away from the true centre of the book, the reason why Antón needs to go on this journey of discovery in the first place.  For me, at least, it does all eventually come together.

Which is not to say that all the threads are neatly gathered up.  It's true that the mystery of the woman-with-child is solved, and that the family manages to come together (and we do eventually find out why Antón Mallick isn't happy), but I wouldn't say that the end of the novel brings the closure I'd expected.  Which is why my question to Casariego at the festival session was about whether he'd ever considered writing a sequel (he hadn't, but I'll take the credit if he changes his mind...).  After all, the search for happiness is a rather long-term project, and I doubt that Antón will be reaching his goal any time soon...

Tony's Reading List at the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival - Part One

Friday the 22nd of August was a beautiful late-winter day in Melbourne, and it also happened to be the day for my annual visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival.  I only go in for one day, but I do my best to make the most of it, and this year I managed to fit four events into about five-and-a-half hours.  And what, exactly, did I see?  Well, stick around, and you'll find out...

*****
One of the main reasons I ended up making the trip in to the big city was the (free) event with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego, whose novel Antón Mallick Wants to be Happy I read a few days before heading to the festival.  This was actually a late addition to the programme after the cancellation of another event, and many of the people who attended were actually unaware of this - the printed programme still had the old details...

The event was MCed by local academic and translator Lilit Thwaites, and considering that the majority of the people in the small ACMI Cube room had heard of neither the book nor the writer, it all went fairly smoothly.  Both Thwaites and Casariego read short extracts from the novel, and they then discussed the book, particularly in relation to similarities between the writer and the eponymous hero of the novel.

The book (which I will be reviewing in early September) is the diary of a man seeking happiness, and one way in which he does so is through an analysis of self-help books and classics.  Casariego said that the reading was perhaps the best part of the writing process; however, he's not a fan of self-help books himself, believing that they're rather aggressive and help to create egotistical monsters.  As for the other books he read in the search for Antón's happiness, he actually preferred some of the more pessimistic ones...

Antón Mallick... is a funny book, something which Casariego says isn't true for all of his works.  One of his biggest challenges was to temper the use of humour in the book, lest it overpower and overshadow the story (certainly, the early sections have a lot of scenes where getting a laugh is the main focus).  The style of the novel, written in the form of a diary, is also important as it allowed the writer to play with the reader.  For one thing, he was able to be a little less politically correct than is normally the case as Mallick is writing for himself, with no need for self-censorship.  However, it also allows him to be a little tricky as there's no guarantee that Antón is telling even himself the whole truth...

Never one to hold back, I asked Casariego a question at the end of the session.  You see, with so many loose ties at the end of the novel, I was wondering if the writer had ever considered a sequel to Antón's quest for happiness.  The answer was a fairly firm 'no', but now that the idea had come up... ;)  If Antón Mallick does return for a second outing, then, you know who to thank/blame :)

*****
After a thirty-minute break spent chatting to Lilit, getting my book signed by the author and cramming a sandwich down as fast as possible, it was back to the cube for the second of the day's events.  This was one of the four City-to-City events designed to give insular Australians more information about some of our Asian neighbours, and the first in the series was on Shanghai.  Author Nic Low was the moderator, and the guests were famed Sino-Australian writer Ouyang Yu (Sino-Australian in that he's lived and worked here for a good while) and two fellow Chinese academics, Gong Jing and Hongtu Wang.

In all honesty, this was by far the weakest of the four sessions I attended.  As an ESL teacher, I've spent many an hour listening to Chinese students reading a prepared script while other students struggle to understand what's being said, and this hour was like a flashback to presentation moderations of times past.  Jing, in particular, merely read a text talking about her life in Shanghai and then barely offered a word in English for the rest of the hour.  When you add to that the fact that the session actually had very little to do with literature, you can imagine how disappointed (and bored) I was for the most part...

Luckily, the third member of the panel was a far better, and more charismatic, speaker, and Yu entertained and informed the small audience with his Shanghai experiences.  From his anecdote about his introduction to Australian literature (when getting his first academic position, all he knew about it was that in Patrick White's fiction "people farted a lot"), to the poems he wrote on his return to Shanghai, about a cheap hotel room and a student who simply could not master a point of English grammar ("She wrote 'Aftering I finished the exam, I felting bad.' - I felt bad too."), Yu was a relaxed, witty speaker - I really must get around to reading one of his books...

Still, it wasn't quite enough to make this a session I would recommend to others, and I walked out hoping that the rest of the day would be better.  The good news?  It definitely was - but you'll have to wait until next time to find out why ;)

'Paris' by Marcos Giralt Torrente (Review)

Time for my second contribution to Spanish-Language Literature Month, and today's offering is from a publisher who deserve to be highlighted this month.  Hispabooks is a fairly recent addition to the ranks of publishers who focus on literature in translation, with their speciality being... well, Spanish literature :)  I've already reviewed a couple of their titles, and this book is one which comes very highly recommended indeed - an intense story made (mostly) in Madrid...

*****
Marcos Giralt Torrente's Paris (translated by Margaret Jull Costa, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is an excellent, psychological novel, a book which looks at the weakness of memory and the dangers of reliance on a single person in your life.  It's written in the form of a monologue told by a middle-aged man looking back to his childhood and, in particular, events surrounding his ne'er-do-well father and his enigmatic, saintly mother.

While the pair have long since parted, there was a strange attraction between the two, one which even the father's spell in prison failed to break, and this forms one of the central issues the narrator attempts to get to the bottom of.  However, he's also fascinated by something which he will never be able to learn the whole truth about (his mother, the only one with full knowledge, is suffering from dementia and has no memory of earlier events).  He believes that the key to the final breakdown of his parents' relationship lies in the time his mother spent in Paris, a time which could reveal several secrets - but it's possible that there are other, darker truths out there, just waiting to be brought into the light...

Paris is intense and powerful, and the combination of great writing and an intriguing secret makes for an excellent novel.  It was the unanimous winner of the 1999 Premio Herralde de Novela (a Spanish prize for debut novels), beating Andrés Neuman's Bariloche into second place.  For a first novel, it's a surprisingly complex and developed piece of writing.  However, the flip side of that is that it should come with a warning - you'll need a lot of concentration to stick to the task at hand.

The novel centres on the figure of the mother, a portrait of the mother as a martyr to her family.  She's a woman who's very good at keeping secrets, holding her true feelings deep within:

"Talking about herself would have meant allowing her "self" to surface, and that was something she simply could not allow.  What she felt and how she really was had to be covered up, concealed beneath hundreds of protective veils - either learned or innate - that established a distance between her and the suffering or hopes that were watching and waiting inside her."
p.40 (Hispabooks, 2014)

The author develops his picture of the mother with a slow, steady build up of details.  A controlled, measured woman who knows her man will disappoint her, she wants to believe in him, despite knowing full well that he will never change. Which rather begs the question - why does she stay with him for so long?  And, more intriguingly, does she have a few more secrets of her own?

As much as the novel is about the mother, though, there's also a lot to discover about the narrator, a man searching for truth among the rubble of half-remembered events.  He's never really sure of the events he discusses, constantly talking around the facts, either because he can't remember them or because he never knew them in the first place (in several places he explains that he was never privy to the whole truth).  In fact, the same is true for the poor reader as we are strung along a little, never really knowing what, or whom, to believe.

While calling him an unreliable narrator might be a touch extreme, it's true that caution is called for when trying to get to the bottom of the story.  His mother's loss of memory fuels his obsession with the past:

"I can no longer separate what she told me from what I know now, from what she gradually confided to me in later, lonelier years, and from what I've since found out for myself, what I dared to think, or what I made up." (p.64)

Much of what he tells us is 'pieced together later', the product of his imagination, although he is the first to admit the problematic nature of his conclusions.  The language used reflects this; it's incredibly tentative and halting, full of conditionals and modals.  The text abounds with phrases such as 'must have been', 'may have said' and 'I will never know if...'.  Still, that doesn't mean he isn't playing with us...

Paris is also about subjectivity, and Giralt Torrente discusses at length the way in which we can confuse facts and feelings:

"Things happen, and later on you might recount them to someone else with more or less exactitude, and the image you convey will not be so very different from the original events.  What you were feeling, though, what was going on inside you while those things were happening, is more a matter of silences.  We can get quite close in our description of events, but we will never be able to describe their very essence, an essence tinged with despair, or joy, or with both at once." (p.37)

Which doesn't stop the writer, and narrator, from trying to pin down the essence of those distant events.  We are drawn into this game too, tempted to judge the characters - the mother, the father, the narrator, his Aunt Delphina.  The problem is that with only a few of the facts, we can never be completely sure that we're right.

The writing is excellent, with a style reminiscent of Saramago and Marías (there are definite shades of A Heart So White here). Paris consists for the most part of long, precise sentences, full of complex clauses, constantly folding back on, and contradicting, themselves.  Of course, this is all aided by the choice of translator - Jull Costa, as always, does a wonderful job, meaning that the book never reads like a translation.

Paris is a very good book, and for those who like his style, there's more out there from Giralt Torrente in translation.  His story collection The End of Love is already available, and Father and Son (which, as Tiempo de Vida, won the Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2011) will appear in English in September.  So is he the next big thing in Spanish?  Well, there's certainly a lot to like.  Paris is a fascinating, complex novel - even the cover, while initially plain, reveals something about the plot.  It's definitely not an easy read, but it's certainly a rewarding one :)

*****
Before I finish, there is one little issue I want to address here.  This is my third Hispabooks work, and all three have had British translators (Rosalind Harvey, Jonathan Dunne and Margaret Jull Costa).  While the translations definitely feel very British, for some reason, the books use American spelling conventions, plus the occasional, jarring Americanism.  It's a trend I'd already picked up in the first two books, and reading Paris merely confirmed it.

These (rare) Americanisms particularly stand out in Jull Costa's excellent translation.  Examples include 'jelly' instead of 'jam', 'wash up' instead of 'wash his face'/'have a wash', 'bills' instead of 'notes' and 'Mom' instead of 'Mum'.  It's not a huge thing, but it seems an odd stylistic choice to me, almost as if the publishers are hedging their bets with the variety of English.  It's likely that most people wouldn't notice, but I like to think that when it comes to translations, I'm not most people ;)

Any thoughts?  I'd love to hear if anyone else has noticed this trend - and what you make of it...

'The Happy City' by Elvira Navarro (Review)

January's over, and it's time to put away the J-Lit and return to the wider world of translated literature.  We're making a start with that today, courtesy of a novel I received for review a while back from Hispabooks.  It's off to Spain then, with just a hint of the Orient too...

*****
Elvira Navarro's The Happy City (translated by Rosalind Harvey) is a book in two halves, with two related stories making up one whole novel.  Both stories are tales of kids growing up in a Spanish city - two Hispanic coming-of-age tales, if you will.

The first is called Story of the Chinese Restaurant "Happy City", and it's all about Chi-Huei, a young Chinese boy who finally arrives in Spain after a couple of years living away from his family.  After his time with his aunt, he has a doubly difficult task ahead.  Not only does he have to adjust to a new country and language, he also has to readjust to life with his mum and dad...

The reader is shown life as a migrant, and it's not all about the delights of the modern world.  While the family has a decent standard of living, it's tough, and they work all hours to keep their heads above water and feel like they're making progress.  For Chi-Huei, there's also the added pressure of school, with his parents pressuring him to focus on his education (when he's not helping out at his parents' restaurant...).

As a young arrival, picking up the language isn't such a big deal, and there is an unexpected benefit when his father begins to express himself more confidently in the new tongue with his two sons.  As with any nascent bilingual though, there are some issues to overcome - and this even extends to his native tongue:

"He could sense himself short-circuiting when, for example, he chatted to his aunt and then carried on using the same accent to speak to his mother, which made him feel strange and become abruptly aware, thanks to a feeling of slight embarrassment, of some sudden inappropriateness, of a subtle variation in his identity.  All at once he sounded false and felt ridiculous when he changed, as if inexplicably taking off his clothes in front of everyone and then putting on new ones that didn't suit him either."
p.32 (Hispabooks, 2013)

It's all part of the challenge of adjusting to a new environment, be it cultural or linguistic.

*****
The second story, The Edge, focuses on Chi-Huei's friend Sara, and this story takes a very different approach.  Sara is an only child, with very clear boundaries set by her parents, and when she one day decides to cross those boundaries, an encounter with a homeless man throws her life into turmoil:

"He is a young homeless man, sitting on the steps with his legs stretched out, his body leaning lazily backwards.  Walking until I come to a halt at the edge of the sidewalk, I am horrified and fascinated; I suddenly recognize myself in the skinny body, the torn clothes, the dirty hair hanging to either side of the face ... for the vision of decay is drawing me toward something I know nothing of." (p.101)

Leaving her permitted path for the first time brings confusion and knowledge of a wider world, one which she isn't really ready to cope with.

In a sense, her decision to cross the line is a move towards the end of childhood, one which leads into a downward spiral of behaviour.  She hides her actions from her parents and invents lies to cover her tracks, something which soon leads to trouble with the law.  Sara is rebelling against home pressures, and she becomes determined to find the homeless man (who seems to be following her) and find out what he wants...

*****
In addition to the friendship between the characters, the main connection between the stories is the theme of relationships between parents and their kids.  Chi-Huei can't see why his parents are working so much; it's not really a means to an end, he sees it as getting rich for the sake of being rich.  In addition to his anger at initially being left behind in China, he gradually becomes aware of a dim future full of responsibility, a future he would rather avoid.

Sara's parents have a very different problem.  Terrified of making a mistake, they're unable to decide between freedom and smothering.  Sara's adventures are simply the curiosity of the unknown, but the more her parents dither, the greater the danger that she will do something stupid.  Her conversations with her new friend have soured her outlook, and, like Chi-Huei, she is pessimistic about the future. 

The Happy City has two interesting stories of growing up, but for me there was no real bite to the book.  I felt it was missing something, and I wasn't convinced that the two stories really made a novel.  It was very easy to read, perhaps a little too easy at times - in fact, I'm a little tempted to describe it as a YA novel (which might actually make many of you more interested in it...).

While it's not really my kind of book, there's definitely a lot there about the problems of moving into a new stage of life, and I'm sure that many people will enjoy it.  Certainly, if you're looking for an international coming-of-age story, you could do worse than give Navarro's book a go :)

'Uppsala Woods' by Álvaro Colomer (Review)

It's a big welcome to the blog to Hispabooks, a new publisher specialising in translations of contemporary Spanish literature.  I was lucky enough to receive a couple of review copies from them recently, and today sees my review of the first - which looks at a very weighty topic...

*****
Álvaro Colomer's Uppsala Woods (translated by Jonathan Dunne) begins when Julio Garrido arrives home on his fifth wedding anniversary.  He's surprised not to be met by his wife, Elena, and looks for her all over his slightly eerie, cruciform apartment without success.  Until, that is, he opens his wardrobe and finds her slumped comatose in the corner.

While the drug overdose is not exactly unexpected (Elena once told Julio of an urge to jump from the balcony...), it's still a shock for the husband.  His wife survives the attempt, but now Julio understands the life that faces him in the future, one of constant vigilance.  It's a realisation which would try anyone, but Julio is hit particularly hard.  You see, he has his own issues when it comes to death...

Right from when I read the first page of the book in a sample, the style grabbed me.  It's an urgent monologue, a man in a hurry, only poor Julio's not really sure where he's heading.  Uppsala Woods is actually the third book in a loose trilogy on death in modern society, with this final book focusing on suicide.  It's not a long book, but even so, it propels the reader along at a fair lick, with some sections leaving you slightly breathless.

Julio is haunted by a childhood trauma, the death of a neighbour, and he has never really got over the event which was to shape his life.  The incident led to severe stress and several problems at school (some fairly embarrassing), leaving him with a special fascination with death - even if he's petrified of it.  On seeing a road accident:

"While others had crowded around the injured person, no doubt fascinated by the fact that death could show its face in such an ordinary place, I had gradually concealed myself behind the traffic light without being aware of my actions, and still today I am surprised that my legs could have taken me away from the scene of the tragedy without having received, directly at least, an order from my brain."
p.40 (Hispabooks, 2013)

Now that his wife seems to be moving towards the realm of death, Julio feels his own life spiralling out of control.  It's a state of affairs which is unlikely to end well.

It becomes increasingly obvious as the book progresses that there were marital issues even before the suicide attempt.  Colomer discusses how marriages start to crumble from the inside, showing how, little by little, walls (and padlocks) appear between two people, as Julio muses about a lack of sex, distance on the sofa in front of the television, and even a reluctance to use the bathroom together.  With the marriage on rocky ground before Elena's overdose, afterwards Julio slowly begins to unravel.  His initial measured tone slips, and he becomes prone to anger, shouting and fits of rage (to the point of causing himself chest pain).

The novel has a wider significance than a marriage breakup though - it's also a look at the way society copes (or doesn't) with mental illness and suicide.  For fear of the 'disease' spreading, people attempt to minimise the risk by covering up the signs.  In fact pain is all too common, much more prevalent than we like to think.  When Julio observes the people in the streets on their way to work, he muses:

"Sometimes, when I focus on their faces, I notice a strange look in their eyes.  Perhaps they are sad, or absent, possibly they don't know where they are going, I sense these emotions because I have acquired a sixth sense for grasping pain, a human being's deep, authentic, insurmountable pain, and I only need to pay attention to their pupils to realize they are gagged by frustration." (p.87)

The struggles of life are obvious wherever Julio looks...

As he begins to lose the plot, fearing he is unable to prevent Elena from trying again, the parallel story of the discovery of the tiger mosquito Julio has been looking for becomes more important.  Heo attempts to immerse himself in his scientific work, even if his imminent breakthrough couldn't have come at a more inopportune time.  There's an obvious handy parallel between the spread of the mosquitoes and what he sees as the increase in the number of suicides, but is his work enough to distract him from his home troubles?

Uppsala Woods is a book I really enjoyed, a gripping read and an entertaining and thought-provoking look at the effects of modern life on our will to live.  The title though has a slightly older origin.  Colomer explains it on the very first page, in a preface which talks of a wood in ancient Viking Europe - a place for the old and weary to dispose of themselves before they became a burden on their communities...

Of course, this is something present-day societies prefer not to discuss, but in his novel the writer forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: is the image of the old swinging from trees such a terrible one?  Or is it worse to see drug-addled depressives forcing themselves to work on the train each day, just waiting for the courage to put an end to it all?  I'll leave you to ponder that one...

'The Swimmers' by Joaquín Pérez Azaústre (Review)

Frisch & Co. is a new publisher specialising in translated fiction, with all their titles appearing in digital form only.  I didn't have much luck with the first book I tried, but from the start, today's choice was the one I really had my eye on.  Reviews compare the book with works by Haruki Murakami, David Lynch and Paul Auster - and while those comparisons are fairly apt, this writer has a style all of his own...

*****
Joaquín Pérez Azaústre's The Swimmers (translated by Lucas Lyndes, e-copy courtesy of the publisher) is a novel in fifty short chapters, mirroring the fifty 50-metre lengths the protagonist swims three times a week.  Jonás, our water-loving friend, is a photographer who, after breaking up with his long-time girlfriend, takes a step back from his career, instead taking pictures for newspapers.

Recently, his time has been spent drinking, working part-time and swimming with his best friend, Sergio, and he has been content to let the world slide by at its own pace as he gets on with his life, one length of the pool at a time.  However, when his father informs him that his mother has disappeared, uncontactable for a couple of months, Jonás realises that something is very wrong.  You see, his mother is not the first person to go missing - and she won't be the last...

The Swimmers is an excellent novel, and the comparisons above are (to me, at least) fairly apt.  In Jonás, we have a very Murakamiesque protagonist, and the slow, measured build-up, with the action implied rather than confronting, builds the tension nicely.  The pivotal scene of the book towards the end is comparable to what Murakami does in both The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore - as is the ambiguous ending.

Jonás is a loner, who is simply not adapting to life in his new flat without his partner.  He's begun to retreat from his commitments, almost living just for his swimming and his lunches with Sergio:

"...because his whole life is strapped to his back and right this instant it takes up no more space than that backpack, he could go practically anywhere, he wouldn't be leaving anything that important behind, in truth there's nothing waiting for him, just that fifty-meter stretch across the water."
(Frisch & Co., 2013)

The one thing that allows him to feel in control of his life is the beautiful rhythm of swimming long distances.

The book can be seen as a subtle criticism of society, one where people no longer make the time to see each other.  As Jonás says to his father:

"And don't go obsessing over this thing with Mom.  There are thousands of families in this city who don't see each other on a regular basis, friends who lose track of one another, and that doesn't mean anyone's vanished into thin air all of a sudden.  I've had friends where if I fall out of touch or lose their cell phone number, if they move to a new place or change their email address, I've got no way to find them."

Tired, permanently stressed, he (like many of us) has no time for family and friends.  Modern life, well, it's rubbish...

While I talked about the Murakami feel of the book above, another novel that came to mind while reading The Swimmers was Saramago's Blindness, not so much because of the style but for the connection between the central ideas.  Like Saramago's contagious blindness, Perez Azaústre's mysterious disappearances seem to impose a bizarre new problem on a fairly normal society, with people gradually becoming more and more frightened as they lose contact with their loved ones.  As in Blindness, it doesn't take long everyone to start to panic.
 
However, it's also possible that the disappearances are merely an allegory - perhaps it's Jonás who's taking a step back from life.  The ever emptier streets and the uncrowded trains might just be a symptom of his problems, representing his gradual withdrawal.  The shadows he sees at the swimming pool, vague outlines lurking behind the large plate-glass windows, might represent the people he's left behind, or lost along the way.  Jonás is certainly nostalgic about his childhood and his lost love - perhaps The Swimmers is a reflection on the loss of contact modern life brings.

The style of the novel is beautiful with long, elegant, sentences mirroring the powerful, driving strokes of Jonás the swimmer (it's no coincidence that there are fifty chapters...).  The writer uses themes of water, light, shadow, heat and coolness to... well, I'm not quite sure, but I'm sure they're there for a reason ;)  The mentions of water are particularly frequent, as you would expect, and there seems to be a connection between the pool, the abandoned water park and the canvas Jonás' mother was working on, one that eventually makes sense.  Even so, it's hard to get your head around everything on a first read - it's a book which deserves to be reread.

I had a quick look around, but I couldn't find any other example of the writer's work in English, which is a surprise.  I loved this book, and it's the kind of novel that many other readers would love too.  Kudos to Frisch & Co., and Lucas Lyndes, on bringing Perez Azaústre's work into English; hopefully, they'll team up again in the future to publish more of his books.

And while we're speaking about the translator, there's a great little piece on the publisher's web-site, in which he discusses the process of translating The Swimmers, with particular mention of style and sentence length.  Anyone interested should definitely take a look :)

'The Infatuations' by Javier Marías (Review)

After the success of A Heart So White, the only question for me was which Javier Marías work to try next.  Should I look for one of his older works, or could I wait until his next one was released in a few months' time?  Which is when I discovered that the new novel was actually already out in the UK (and Australia), and that my library had a copy available...

*****
The Infatuations (translated, once again, by Margaret Jull Costa) takes place in Madrid, where we follow María Dolz, a young woman working in publishing, who comes to a cafe every morning before work to prepare herself mentally for the day ahead.  Often she sees a man and a woman there, a pair she silently dubs 'The Perfect Couple', and though she never makes contact beyond occasional nods and glances, they become part of her routine.

The couple disappear for a while, and María eventually finds out that the man, Miguel Desvern, was killed in a tragic, senseless street attack.  María sees the wife, Luisa, again one day and condoles her.  She is invited back to the house, and meets a family friend, Javier Díaz-Varela... and it all gets a little bit suspicious from here.  You see, while María is infatuated with Javier (who is happy to have some fun), he only has eyes for the fair widow - which leads the attentive reader to think a little harder about the circumstances of poor Miguel's untimely demise...

The Infatuations is the story of a death which turn out to be less straight-forward and tragic than it first appears.  It soon becomes clear that there is a lot more to the story than what was publicly reported.  However, every time the reader starts to understand (or think they understand) what happened, the writer shifts the goals, changing the question and giving us more food for thought.  While the plot could be a thriller, the way Marías handles it makes it much more.

It's another deeply written work, a novel where every word seems important, or possibly important.  The success of the book depends on the narrative voice, and it's a very good one.  María (sarcastic, hard-bitten, cynical, but loving) tells us the story, one of love, loss, death and murder.  While María is suspicious of Javier's intentions, what interests her (and the reader) is how it all happened - and why.

María's connection with the couple is an interesting one in itself.  Despite seeing them on a regular basis for years, she never gets to talk to them - modern life is busy, and we are left with no time to reflect.  After Miguel's death, she catches herself thinking about ambulances, and the way we moan at delays in traffic instead of thinking about the poor soul inside the vehicle.  Of course, we always think about the dead when it's too late... 

But no matter how much we mourn the dead, do we really want them back?  Marías gently prods at the sore spots of our conscience, suggesting that this is not always the case.  Often, the one left behind is (eventually) better off, and Luisa, in her muddled, grief-affected way, seems to recognise this:

"Like I say, it's changed my way of thinking, and it's as if I don't recognise myself any more; or, rather, it seems to me sometimes that I never knew myself in my previous life, and that Miguel didn't know me either: he couldn't have, it would have been beyond him, isn't that strange?  If the real me is this woman constantly making all these connections and associations, things that a few months ago would have seemed to me completely disparate and unrelated; if I am the person I've been since his death, that means that for him I was always someone else, and had he lived, I would have continued to be the person I'm not, indefinitely."
p.53 (Hamish Hamilton, 2013) 

More importantly, Javier is a firm believer in this philosophy, and hopes that time will heal all wounds...

As much as it is about death and loss, The Infatuations (as you'd expect from the name) also examines love and lust (with a slightly Latin slant).  The book has several overlapping couples, chains of lovers waiting to see which way to jump.  While Javier pursues Luisa, María waits patiently with another lover for distraction:

"...with a little bad luck and a few more lovers of the kind who allow themselves to be loved and neither reject nor reciprocate that love, the chain could have gone on for ever.  A series of people lined up like dominoes, all waiting for the surrender of one entirely oblivious woman, to find out who would fall next to them." (pp.125/6)

It's an endless chain of hopeful lovers waiting for one grieving widow to move on...

Another interesting aspect to the novel is the clever intertwining of stories from classic French fiction with the main story.  Balzac's Colonel Chabert (a story of a man returning from the dead, and the consequences of his return) and Dumas' The Three Musketeers (particularly the part about the origins and return of the ominous Milady) become key to Marías' story, but gradually and skillfully, so that the reader only slowly becomes aware of the significance of the books.  There is also a mention for Old Goriot and (of course!) Macbeth - I am beginning to sense that Marías is obsessed with this play ;)

There are similar themes here to those found in A Heart So White, particularly the idea of letting the past stay there, and the style is again a wonderful creation of long sentences and phrases whose significance only becomes clear later on.  However, there are also some striking differences.  María's voice gives the novel a very different slant, and the humour of the publishing world (hated writers, boring parties, delicately turning down requests to source class-A narcotics...) makes a welcome relief from some of the darker episodes.

One criticism I had is that it is a little slow at times, particularly in the conversations between Javier and María (which appear to be happening at real-life speed...).  Nevertheless, the story keeps the reader's attention to the very end, and (just as in real life) our questions are never truly answered.  After 350 pages, we're no closer to uncovering Marías' secrets than we were at the start - which can be a good thing.

Great writing, and a good story.  If I were a betting man, I'd be putting a few bob on this to make next year's IFFP longlist (and possibly shortlist).  You heard it here first ;)

'A Heart So White' by Javier Marías (Review)

Last week, I posted on a new-to-me writer, José Saramago, who I decided to try after listening to a podcast, and today is another of my podcast-influenced library choices.  There has been a lot of talk recently about Javier Marías, mainly because his latest book (The Infatuations) is out in English in the UK (August in the US), so I decided to give him a try.  And I'm very glad I did :)

*****
A Heart So White (translated by Margaret Jull Costa) was the winner of the 1997 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and it is a great novel.  The main character is Juan, an interpreter and translator who has just got married to his colleague, Luisa.  While you would expect him to be happy,  he has some nagging doubts about the future, mainly because of a conversation at the wedding with his father, Ranz.  Marriage is all well and good, but as Ranz asks, what happens next?

Ranz has good reason to be nervous (or sceptical) about the future.  In the very first scene of the book, we learn how his wife killed herself shortly after the honeymoon, and while he later married her sister, happiness (despite his financial and work success) has proven elusive.  He has always been reticent about the past, preferring to keep silent about his misfortunes, even when Juan asks him directly.  However, some of Ranz's friends are a little more careless, and after Juan's wedding, startling details begin to emerge.  It appears that there is more to the suicide than Ranz is telling...

This is not an adequate summary of the plot of A Heart So White, and it never could be.  It's a book so exquisitely written and cleverly thought out, a wonder to read, but fairly difficult to summarise.  The story is told through Juan's eyes, and at first the reader struggles to work out where the writer is taking us.  We move around in time, swap continents and learn small details about seemingly unconnected people.  Slowly though, shapes start to appear from the void, connections are made, secrets are uncovered...  It all finally comes together in a memorable chapter.

While A Heart So White is wonderfully plotted, a large part of the attraction lies in the writer's style.  Marías, like Saramago, uses long sentences with multiple clauses, but his style is very different to that of the Portuguese writer.  His sentences are long and languid, repetitive at times, circling slowly around, and the meaning often only becomes clear a lot later in the novel when they are repeated, usually in a very different context.  There is a confessional nature to Juan's narrative, and his chains of thoughts, innocuous at first, slowly creep under the reader's skin.  It took me a while to catch on to his style, but I raced through the second half of the book.

In a sense, it's a novel about the nature of relationships, and a central theme is the way love is rarely a two-way street, with one partner obliging, compelling the other to love them, or being compelled to do so:

"Any relationship between two people always brings with it a multitude of problems and coercions, as well as insults and humiliations... Everyone obliges everyone else."
p.178 (The Harvill Press, 1997)

It's an interesting thought, but for an Englishman the most intriguing thing about it is that it first comes from the mouth of a female English politician - surely a thinly-veiled Margaret Thatcher...

Another focus is on secrets, and the importance of keeping them.  Marías, through his creations, constantly stresses that what isn't told, never happened, and that time levels everything anyway:

"...what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try..." (p.179)

This sense of the past slipping into oblivion (providing we take good care never to try to uncover it) is what allows Ranz and Juan to peacefully co-exist.  Of course, when Luisa decides that Juan needs to know more about his father's past, this balance is threatened.

The careful reader, on speeding through A Heart So White, may also pick up on the frequent allusions to Macbeth, and in fact the title of Marías' novel is a quotation from the play.

"My hands are of your colour; but I shame
To wear a heart so white"
Macbeth, II.2 (Lines 64-5)

Lady Macbeth is talking to her husband after he has 'done the deed', and it appears that she is chiding him for his timidness, although Marías, through Juan, also talks about how the white heart refers to Lady Macbeth's innocence, in as far as she herself did not wield the knife.  Whatever the interpretation, the quotation is inextricably linked with the events of the book - I'll say no more...

In the end, Marías ties everything together so well.  Echoes and parallels resound and rebound across the years, continents and pages, and the events of decades all serve to bring Juan (and the reader) to one fateful evening.  It is only then that we understand the true meaning behind the words Juan casually utters near the start of the novel:

"I have a tendency to want to understand everything, everything that people say and everything I hear, even at a distance, even if it's in one of the innumerable languages I don't know, even if it's in an indistinguishable murmur or an imperceptible whisper, even if it would be better that I didn't understand and what's said is not intended for my ears, or is said precisely so that I won't hear it." (p.244)

A Heart So White is a wonderful book in an excellent translation (thanks, once more, are due to the incredibly-talented Jull Costa), and Marías is a writer I'll be reading a lot more of in future.  I'm a little late to the party, but arriving fashionably late does have its advantages - I've got a lot of catching up to do :)

Big Time Intertextuality

He belongs to an increasingly rare breed of sophisticated, literary bloggers - this is the thought which (somewhat ironically) crosses Tony's mind as the sound of the car taking his wife and children away slowly fades, leaving him free to wander into the study and finally sit down to the computer whose siren call he has been avoiding for the past few hours.  He picks up the book he has just finished, noting the aptness of the cover - a man in the process of taking a giant, life-defining leap...

Reading Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas' stunning novel of a publisher's trip to Dublin to bury the age of print literature and work out what to do with himself next, has been an exhilarating, absorbing journey through modern literary history, a novel so awash with references to other artists and their works that Tony has stayed up late into the night, stopping here to open his copy of Ulysses (forced into rereading Chapter Six by the obvious parallels with Vila-Matas' book), pausing there to refresh his memory of Joyce's short story The Dead (another work frequently referenced in Dublinesque).  Now, as the rest of the world goes about its business, Tony's brain is still twisting and turning, his mind still searching for elusive threads of meaning.

He walks over to the window, looking for signs of good weather, anything to keep him away from the computer, but mid-winter Melbourne rain continues to flow down, concealing the further edges of the garden and gradually causing the study windows to steam up, leaving Tony isolated in his warm, dimly-lit room.  With a sigh, he sits down at his desk, clicking three times on the mouse with practiced ease and turning on some music to help him focus (Franz Ferdinand - how apt), before opening a Word document - which he proceeds to stare at for a while as the music washes over him...

He tries to concentrate on Samuel Riba, the central character, a former literary publisher whose sudden, irrational decision to fly to Dublin for Bloomsday with some friends shakes his life out of the rut it was in.  The way the writer blends elements from Ulysses, structuring parallels with Joyce's famous novel, the way he draws on thoughts and images from an astonishingly wide variety of sources...  Tony turns to his copy of Dublinesque, pulls out the scrap of paper with the scribbled notes he has made, and begins Googling images - Hammershøi's painting of The British Museum in fog, Edward Hopper's Stairway (another song plays on the computer, The Police's Wrapped Around your Finger) -, but he's getting nowhere.  He sighs and continues thinking...

He decides that he needs to distract himself, and he eases himself, not without difficulty, out of the chair he feels so comfortable in, standing up, slowly looking around, as if expecting help to come from someone (even though there is nobody there), before walking out into the kitchen.  He does the washing up to clear his head and then makes a couple of pieces of raisin toast, pouring himself a mug of soya milk to go with his impromptu second breakfast.  Back in the study, he becomes tired of the music and puts on an old Powderfinger CD, and as the strains of Waiting for the Sun ring out, he sits back waiting for inspiration - in vain.  In fact, the only thing he can think of is the irony in the fact of the book about Riba (a publisher deeply disillusioned by the success of 'gothic' - i.e. vampire - fiction), being published in English by the same house that brought out Fifty Shades of Grey...

Musing that if Riba was waiting for the return of the real reader, he was probably well out of the publishing game, Tony decides to browse online book shops for other works and writers mentioned in Dublinesque: Finnegan's Wake (of course), Paul Auster, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett...  Tony pauses, leaning back in his chair, feeling that he has come to the crucial point of his cerebral meanderings at last; for if the first part of Dublinesque has Riba's life parallelling the events of Ulysses, the final section moves from the high of Joyce to the low of Beckett.  Tony sighs.  In that case, it's a shame that he has never read anything by Beckett...  As he continues to stare blankly at the mockingly pristine document on the computer screen, the feeling of being watched grows ever stronger, compelling him to turn and look out of the window.  Nothing.  Just a man in a blue jacket, hurrying down the hill in the rain, head fixed straight ahead, in no way looking in Tony's direction.

Rubbing his eyes, Tony manages to stand up again, now feeling the familiar dry feeling in his mouth from last night's wine, wanting a glass of water to ease the headache he can sense beginning.  He starts to pace the study, walking around in circles while his thoughts go around in the opposite direction.  Dublinesque is a great book, a wonderful book, a seamless read, a credit to the writer and to his translators into English, Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean.  But - (Tony's pacing slows as he struggles against the thoughts coming the other way) - what am I actually going to say about it?  How can I construct a coherent review describing its brilliance while including the feel of the novel?  Should I simply type out 600 words with a brief overview of the plot and a recommendation to just read the book?

Gradually the pacing slows eventually coming to a complete stop as gravity inertia weight of years and the force of the counterbalancing train of thought combine to bring him to a halt Tony looks up and for the first time we see him with a smile on his face as he realises that there is only one way to do justice to the book while concealing his inability to truly understand truly get to the heart of what it actually is Vila-Matas wants to say and he says to himself in the middle of that warm dark room he says that's what I'll do I'll just write it as I think it should be written I'll style it as if it were taken from Vila-Matas Joyce whoever intertextuality yes intertextuality and people can read into what they will what they want what they feel or is that too obvious perhaps no it's a good idea better than the usual rubbish anyway will I won't I and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The Danger of Giving Someone the Cold Shoulder...

After my (ad)venture into classical Spanish literature, it's time today for some more contemporary fare, although the setting is actually anything but modern.  There is a connection though - today's hero is tilting at some pretty big windmills...

*****
Lorenzo Mediano's The Frost on his Shoulders (translated by Lisa Dillman, review copy kindly sent by Europa Editions) is a novella set in the Pyrenees shortly before the Spanish Civil War.  The story begins when the inhabitants of the small mountain village of Biescas de Obago become aware of an article in a regional newspaper, dredging up old history and besmirching the name of the town.  Infuriated, they charge the local teacher with writing a response to the article, determined to refute the allegations made.  The teacher takes on the task, but is reluctant to do so for several reasons: firstly, he knows full well that it's a waste of time; secondly, he also knows that the article is much closer to the truth than the tales spun by the villagers.

After fulfilling his useless task, the teacher then decides to secretly write down what really happened, the story of a young shepherd boy, Ramón, and his wealthy beloved, Alba.  It's a story of star-crossed lovers, two young people who can never be together - not because of any animosity between the families, but because the very idea of love straddling the social divide is so dangerous that it could tear the whole village apart...

The Frost on his Shoulders is a fascinating story of what happens when one man decides to stand up against what fate and tradition have decreed to be his future.  Although it starts a little slowly, what begins as a potentially predictable story of thwarted lovers soon becomes something much more than that, a tale of history at a crossroads.  The teacher explains to his audience that:

"...it's all well and good for a shepherd to be able to count, so he can tell if any sheep are missing, and the fact that everyone here can sign his name lends our town a bit of prestige; but that's enough.  Because any more than that and people start dreaming, wishing things were different than they are..." p.36

The way they are is, to be honest, feudal.  A handful of wealthy families own all the land surrounding the village, and anyone not lucky enough to be an heir to one of these houses is a nobody, a possession.  The local workers are bound by unwritten rules, stuck working in the same place and unable to marry as they are needed to labour for the rich families.  Even if they were, the local tradition of disposing of many female babies at birth (women are only needed for producing heirs...) ensures that there aren't enough women to go around.

Against this background then, the slightest sign of insubordination is seen as a threat, a challenge to the status quo, and our story bears this out.  Ramón, educated above the normal degree for a rural worker, decides that he wants to rise above his station, earn money and marry the delicate, beautiful Alba, heiress to the richest house in the area.  The ruling class decides that he must be crushed, denying him the opportunity to work, but as Ramón undergoes immense hardship in the mountains to make it on his own, the undertrodden villagers slowly begin to support him, seeing in him a role model, a symbol of change and progress - exactly what the landowners feared...

The story builds to a stunning, and slightly unpredictable, climax, with the reader willing Ramón on to achieve the unachievable, all the while knowing that the odds are against him.  Allowing the young upstart to attain his goal will open a crack in the carefully-constructed social edifice which sustains the profitability and survival of the village against the harsh, unforgiving environment it is surrounded by.  In a tension-filled village, with violence only ever a heartbeat away, it is inevitable that there will be bloodshed...

As mentioned earlier, the story is narrated by the teacher, an outsider who acts as a sort of guide through the alien culture of the villagers.  He has had to adapt to a place where life seems stuck in the 1620s, not the 1920s, and he is our voice in the wilderness.  However, it's probably best not to trust him too much...  His version of the story is just as subjective and personal as that collected from the accounts of the villagers, and most of what he recounts is hearsay.  He is, to say the least, more than a little biased ;)

*****

I enjoyed The Frost on his Shoulders, but there was one thing I was confused by.  The cover of my edition has a blurb on it, "A gripping piece of eco-fiction set in the Pyrenees Mountains", a comment which I initially found puzzling and rather superfluous.  I had never heard of eco-fiction, and I really couldn't see any environmental influences in the book.  Then, last night, I was flicking through a book on literary fiction (a work I've been slowly perusing for the last few months), and it all suddenly became clear.

Ecocriticism is a strand of literary theory which looks at literature from the viewpoint of nature, putting the environment, usually seen as merely the setting for events, in a central position.  Instead of focusing on what the characters do, we look at how the environment they live in has shaped them, and The Frost on his Shoulders is a perfect example for this train of thought.  Life in the mountains is hard, precisely because of the isolation and the extreme weather conditions, and the type of society which exists there has been forced upon the villagers by the problems the environment poses.

However, Ramón, while rebelling against society, is actually supported by nature.  The harsh conditions make it possible for him (with a lot of hard work) to make a success of his life, and his upbringing in the mountains allows him to find food and shelter - and survive - in a place where many people would simply keel over and die...  This idea of the book as a work of eco-fiction is new to me, but it's a very interesting one, and extremely apt here :)

Whether you buy this idea or not, the setting is of paramount importance to the story.  Our narrator excuses the brutality of life in the village by referring to the difficulty of life there:

"Try to understand, dear reader, that these innocent jokes, though cruel, are less so than life in the mountains; and if village women want to know every little thing you're up to, it's only because they lead empty lives; and if we make light of everything, it's only to keep from crying." p.39

I think that by the end of the book, anyone who tries The Frost on his Shoulders will know exactly what he means...