What remains by Brais Lamela

Spanish Galician fiction

Original title – Ninguén queda

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Personal Copy

I have read a few books from Galicia over the years, one of the regions of Spain that has a distinct identity and history. The book is written by one of the region’s rising stars, Brais Lamela. He is considered one of the best writers under 40 and has won a prize for being one of the best writers under 40; this book, his debut novel, was also on EL País’ books of the year when it came out. The book sort of mirrors the writer’s own life, as the narrator is a man studying in New York and from Galicia himself, like Brais, who is studying at Yale. The book is set around a piece of history that involved Franco trying to modernise the country, and this involved relocating a group of Farmers from the remote valleys that Franco had ordered to be filled and made into Dams, so they were forced to move to the Terra Cha, the farming land in the Galicia region, but as incomers torn from their homes.

It’s not the first time I’ve found a reference to a trip of the sort. When I first started researching the U.S. government’s aid to the Franco dictatorship, I stumbled upon the story of some hydraulic engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, who had developed a new system for pumping underground water in the desert flats of Southern California, and travelled to a few colonial settlements in southern Spain to install it.

Thanks to their help, the dictatorship’s engineers were able to penetrate the depths of the earth and extend their control to the world of underground channels. I hadn’t found much about their trip, but I’d been left with an idea that those connections might be the most useful material for my thesis, revealing the inconspicuous flow of information between American capitalist institutions and Franco’s dictatorship, like synapses of a vast and terrible nervous system.

The narrator discovers the past

The novel is framed as the student in New York trying to look back at the events of the Franco era; when he comes across this mass relocation from the hills to the plains of grassland in Galicia, as they are now expect to be dairy farmers, the story is further framed when the narrator finmds the story of a woman that had disappeared around the time all this had happened. The second half of the book sees our narrator revisiting the places he had looked at in the first half as he recounts what happened to those who stayed in the mountains; now the remains of the village are a hippie commune. To the dairylands of the TERRA CHA, how the people lived on from those still living, and how it was all for show at times. It captures one man’s look into the past, how it touches the present, and how often history repeats.

I stop the recording, realizing that the story I was looking for had been there all along. It hadn’t caught my attention at the time, one more story in the litany of tragedies the colonists had faced. I’d been distracted by the anecdote about Franco (which I’d heard in other recordings, though some mentioned a different government figure). Now everything seems to make sense, and the anonymous figures acquire names: the important visitors’ were almost certainly Tannenbaum and his team, and the expelled woman was the ill-fated Leonita, who in a matter of days found herself not just widowed but homeless.

Talking to thiose that were there and How they made it look different when Franco appeared

This is one of those books that is hard to pigeonhole; it is a novel but also a memoir a thesis about the times, a look at the Franco Regime and the dark past it meant for those forcibly exiled due to him wanting Dams built for Hydro power as I said in the last passage It is also a sign of how history can repaet how many more Dams have been built around the world by regimes. I was reading this and thinking of all the people who were relocated when China built the Three Gorges Dam; over a million people were displaced to make way for the dam.  This book is a clever twist on a piece of history with the framing of looking through the archives this is part of Brais Lamela own studies is into archives one can see how pieces of history being the seed for this clever story of exiles and one woman who dosappeared it has it all the sense of belonging, getting lost on the turbulance of all this the aftermath years later when our narrator returns to the places in the first half of the book! I think this is one of those gems that has gone under the radar. A must for fans of writers like Sebald or Luiselli in particular, as they both live in New York, and this being a book that captures both the old and the new world, another book I was most reminded of was Bilbao- New York- Bilbao, another multi-layered novel of diaries, memories, place, folklore and time ab Basque work that covered bith sides of the atlantic as well ! Do you have a favourite book from Galicia?