Category: Galica

What remains by Brais Lamela

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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?

 

Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé

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Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé

Galician fiction

Original title – a noite do corvo

Translator – Jonathan Dunne

Source – Review copy

I have long been a fan of thePress Small stations, run by the translator Jonathan Dunne. I first came across him with the books of Manuel Rivas he had translated, which, early on in this blog, were my favourite books I read. So when he kindly sent me three of the newer titles, I was excited. This one jumped out as I don’t read many crime novels, but for me, this had some classic crime novel traits Abel Tomé is both a Journalist and a welder, it said on the rear cover ( I read that and immediately thought of the Smiley quote it is such circumstances that produces certain people) He is known for his ability to take readers to new settings and the attendant myths. This book is a perfect example of that!

“It was the night of the crow. I heard it sing and jump with the full moon on top of the thatched roof.

After that, it went away, but carried on singing.”

“Singing? Since when does a crow sing?”

Lúa looked at me. This didn’t stop the old woman picking up on the irony.

“You know what I mean, inspector. It was the night of the crow. I’m sure of it. And when the crow sings at that kind of time, it’s for only one reason. The premonition of death. That’s right, death.”

I hated all of that. Superstition. The divine. Miracles.

“Thanks be to God.” Something beyond. Beyond? Where?

What a pile of nonsense! The old woman dressed in

mourning for twenty years, talking of crows that presage death. In Galataz, people leave whatever small change they have in the church’s basket.

The island is steep in Myths and the old tradtions as well !

I said this had classic crime novel traits. Well, we have a family of four found dead on a house next to a lighthouse on an island that has two prominent families, and the island itself can be self-governing. In addition, the police have to call in to solve the crime. The police inspector called in is a man haunted by the loss of his wife. He ends up butting heads with the locals as the island has its own way of doing things. Inspector Goncalves is handed the case and gets his two assistants to meet him on Gothard Island. Pierre, a sex addict who chain smokes, and Lua, who has a father with Alzheimer’s. he is the one member of the police who has a connection through his family to the island. The crime of the death of the schoolteacher and his family lead the team into the heart of the island and the community divide y the family and also the laws like they still have the death penalty and how a trial would run shock the police. It seems Gothard is stuck in the past and hasn’t changed its legal system since the Middle Ages. This crime novel sees them dealing with everything on the island as much as solving the crime. It is more than just murder and links to events in the town they are from

Rowan Faol lived in the north of Gothard, in a kind of luxury residential development with about fifteen houses. The strange thing is some of the houses belonged to big shots from Beth. On the island, they could enjoy some privacy. They paid the chancellor to drive away those journalists who stick to famous people’s butts.

Celebrity magazines and the like. The truth is in that place there was lots of discussion about the future of the city. I always imagined them sitting at a round table, discussing ways of earning more money at the expense of Beth’s naive inhabitants. An epidemic, the threat of economic crisis, a new law…

One of the people theymeet from one of the two main famlies the Faols and the Carthaigs !

What caught my attention about this book is the setting, the Island of Gothard, which reminds me of places like the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, where bits of the old feudal system are still around on the island. Add to that, the two main families. Then, the secrets of the island’s two main families, the three main officers, all have their own burdens, from constantly looking at the females of the islands to Lua’s own connection to the island. Then add the four dead bodies, and you have the making of what is an excellent gem of a novel. It is what made Agatha Christie’s books work well. Islands were one of her favourite settings for a novel. Then, the classic incoming police officers clashing with the locals is a common theme of great crime fiction. Then, he throws in a local leader who wants to have his fingers in the case and wants it done his way. I said I hadn’t read any crime novels, but this was the first of two I read in the last couple of weeks. Both twist the genre. Do you like crime novels that are more than just a crime novel like this?

 

 

The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

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The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

Galician fiction

Original title -Os seres queridos

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Review copy

I have been championing the three times rebel [ress since they started bring books out they have a great ethos of working-class female voices in the minority languages. This time we stay in Spain but move to Galicia To a novelist and poet that is regarded as one of the leading voices of Galician literature, having won prizes both for her poetry and fiction. This novel won the Xerais Novel Award. She is also a well-known editorShe directs the independent publishing house Rodolfo e Priscila and is the director of the Rúa do Lagarto collection. This is the first book to be translated into English from her.

The book was about a mother who loses her son in a traffic accident. She was a radio show host for a local station and lived alone. A few months after the accident, still grieving, she moved in with her grandmother, an elderly woman who had some sort of dementia and wasn’t very mobile but was the only family the mother had left. Lucia asks if the grandmother resembles my grandmother Maria. I say probably, I’m sure she does, and detail some of my grandmother’s behaviours over the past few months. For example, she almost always recognises me the moment I come into the room, but often forgets recent news or what year it is; she asks me about grades and exams, as if I’m still an under-graduate, or about the father of my son, as if Miguel and I had never split up.

The book she was writing about a mother losing a son

This is a hard book to grasp as the events in the book seem so odd, but then again, life is odd and this is one bone journey I feel there will be many more women like our narrator here that have the feeling and guilt and trauma she has after birth and in motherhood. The book is about when is a mother ready to be a mother? What happens when your role as a mother doesn’t fit you? That is the heart of this story a woman struggling with that exact dilemma as she struggles to connect with her son so she tries to write a novel about losing a son at five years old. She had seen motherhood as something else, but the depression she has felt since the birth of her son, and the loss of self that comes with that is hard to deal with for her. So what will she do when she falls pregnant for a second time? How will she react, and how will the world around her react as she decides she may take a decision that will shock people near her. But she proves she still has choices to make around her life and her body. This is a hard-hitting story of one woman’s journey into motherhood and what happens when you maybe opt out of the role of being a mother.

THE BOY WAKES UP EARLY, CONTENTEDLY, ON THE FIRST DAY of winter and asks me how long it is until the school Christmas play and the day he can finally open up the presents under the tree. I tell him there won’t be a tree at Grandma Mara’s house-at most there’ll be a porcelain Baby Jesus shrouded by a wreath-and that it’s only four more sleeps. He’s a bit disappointed about the tree, but I try to convince him it will be a festive day: we’ll see my parents and my uncles, we’ll sing songs, and he’ll be able to help my sister prepare the tray of desserts and sweets. The boy asked for a stuffed doll, a picture book with two bears that are friends, and a bike. He repeats his list of presents and counts off on his fingers the nights he has to wait for them.

There is a coldness in this description of her son

 

This has a feel of auto fiction in its town I was reminded of how well Anne Ernaux speaks around her world with a flourish or over-elaboration at times, and this is the same it hasn’t to much luggage to the story it is narrative of her journey told as that no sidetrack or detours and it is so much more potent for that case as it shows how mental illness a post-birth can ravage that connection between mother and child but also what might happen after that when you have to face going through pregnancy again. It is a candid insight into post-natal depression but also how, even after that, women can still be strong and stand up. I am a big fan of three times rebel as they bring us voices that may have gone under the radar otherwise. This is a hard-hitting book for the reader, Have you read any books that deal with post-natal depression and Motherhood?

Winston’s score – +A Sparsh, stunning prose of one woman’s journey