Fever dream of a novel in Spain
By Andrea Thompson |
October 31, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THIS absorbing novel - the first from the distinguished Spanish author to be translated into English - is full of mild sensations. Mild humor (bacalao soaked for dinner in the toilet tank) gives way to mild horror (a woman bends over another's baby with "the posture of certain all-consuming insects"), which in turn yields to mild philosophizing (on the "admiration that denizens of the rural world feel for folding things"). At times, the mildness turns to provocation, as when the main character, a simple yet baffling woman named Maria Antonia Etxarri, watches a troop of soldiers and has "a feeling that one of those soldiers, if not more than one, was going to rape her." The placidity with which she faces this prospect is galvanic. But de Lope's languid sentences, artfully translated by John Cullen, continue to unfurl, and you find yourself sinking back into the narrative as if it were quicksand.
On the face of it, the story beginning just before the Spanish Civil War, is straightforward. Maria Antonia is indeed raped - by a sergeant marking his first wedding anniversary far from his wife. Decades later, she has inherited the estate of Las Cruces from her employer, Isabel Cruces. Enter Miguel Goitia, Isabel's grandson, who is training to become a lawyer and has chosen Las Cruces as a quiet place to study. There is some ineffable bond linking these three characters, but no one asks questions, and no one provides answers unbidden.
It's left to an outsider, Dr. Castro, who lives next door to Las Cruces and harbors mysterious feelings for young Goitia, to tease out the connections. Castro knows about the past and through his memories these events are slowly revealed; he also seeks to find the tendons that bind them together. The fact that he is hobbled by a leg shattered in a motorcycle accident creates a "Rear Window"-like combination of boredom, helplessness and voyeurism.
While the uncovering of secrets provides the spine of the narrative, its appeal lies in the way de Lope makes us question just how separate the past and present may really be. Dates are indeterminate; entire lifetimes are compressed into a single sentence. Everything seems at once known and unknown.
De Lope has written a fever dream of a novel. And it passes just as a dream does: you close the book and though a few strangely beautiful moments linger ("The flowers stood in a vase and opened slowly, like a choir of little women with curious little heads"), what largely remains is a vague impression, an incoherent sense of something profound, a mild sensation of unease.
On the face of it, the story beginning just before the Spanish Civil War, is straightforward. Maria Antonia is indeed raped - by a sergeant marking his first wedding anniversary far from his wife. Decades later, she has inherited the estate of Las Cruces from her employer, Isabel Cruces. Enter Miguel Goitia, Isabel's grandson, who is training to become a lawyer and has chosen Las Cruces as a quiet place to study. There is some ineffable bond linking these three characters, but no one asks questions, and no one provides answers unbidden.
It's left to an outsider, Dr. Castro, who lives next door to Las Cruces and harbors mysterious feelings for young Goitia, to tease out the connections. Castro knows about the past and through his memories these events are slowly revealed; he also seeks to find the tendons that bind them together. The fact that he is hobbled by a leg shattered in a motorcycle accident creates a "Rear Window"-like combination of boredom, helplessness and voyeurism.
While the uncovering of secrets provides the spine of the narrative, its appeal lies in the way de Lope makes us question just how separate the past and present may really be. Dates are indeterminate; entire lifetimes are compressed into a single sentence. Everything seems at once known and unknown.
De Lope has written a fever dream of a novel. And it passes just as a dream does: you close the book and though a few strangely beautiful moments linger ("The flowers stood in a vase and opened slowly, like a choir of little women with curious little heads"), what largely remains is a vague impression, an incoherent sense of something profound, a mild sensation of unease.
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