Even when things fall quiet, there are two classes of silence. A friendly silence that keeps us company, where words can be at leisure, and another silence. One that frightens.” Silence lies at the heart of the latest novel from Galician journalist Rivas (The Carpenter’s Pencil). In 1936, Franco’s Falangists burned books in Coruña’s María Pita Square and at the docks that supplied the Galician city’s livelihood of fish, trade, and shipping. Rivas’s novel is teeming with voices—the unbeatable boxer who worked as a plumber, Arturo da Silva; his “sentimental sparring partner,” Vicente Curtis, burdened with the nickname “Hercules son of a whore” since he was a boy; the impossibly sweet voiced tango singer, Luís Terranova; Olinda, the quick-fingered matchstick maker–turned–saboteur–turned–washerwoman. Each narrative alone might have furnished a novel. The hole burnt into the city’s intellectual center smolders and spreads under Franco for decades, devouring the talent, sanity, memory, morality, and lives of an entire generation. Francisco Crecente, known as “Polka,” a gardener and sometime bagpipe player, is forced to rake and bury the charred books. He’s imprisoned, sent to a labor camp, and becomes a gravedigger. The soldiers who set the books ablaze ascend to power to become an unscrupulous censor, a corrupt inspector, and a fanatical judge. Children grow up stuttering (afraid to speak) or lazy eyed (refusing to see). They finger the charred edges of the books their parents salvaged and hid, searching for answers to unanswerable questions, helpless to recover either individual stories or the collective history lost to the flames. Making sense of the lively crowd of characters and not strictly linear structure can be as confusing as sorting unbound half-burned pages, but attentive readers will be rewarded by a rare find: an epic and resoundingly lyrical refutation of totalitarianism and cruelty. (Oct.)
Even when things fall quiet, there are two classes of silence. A friendly silence that keeps us company, where words can be at leisure, and another silence. One that frightens.” Silence lies at the heart of the latest novel from Galician journalist Rivas (The Carpenter’s Pencil). In 1936, Franco’s Falangists burned books in Coruña’s María Pita Square and at the docks that supplied the Galician city’s livelihood of fish, trade, and shipping. Rivas’s novel is teeming with voices—the unbeatable boxer who worked as a plumber, Arturo da Silva; his “sentimental sparring partner,” Vicente Curtis, burdened with the nickname “Hercules son of a whore” since he was a boy; the impossibly sweet voiced tango singer, Luís Terranova; Olinda, the quick-fingered matchstick maker–turned–saboteur–turned–washerwoman. Each narrative alone might have furnished a novel. The hole burnt into the city’s intellectual center smolders and spreads under Franco for decades, devouring the talent, sanity, memory, morality, and lives of an entire generation. Francisco Crecente, known as “Polka,” a gardener and sometime bagpipe player, is forced to rake and bury the charred books. He’s imprisoned, sent to a labor camp, and becomes a gravedigger. The soldiers who set the books ablaze ascend to power to become an unscrupulous censor, a corrupt inspector, and a fanatical judge. Children grow up stuttering (afraid to speak) or lazy eyed (refusing to see). They finger the charred edges of the books their parents salvaged and hid, searching for answers to unanswerable questions, helpless to recover either individual stories or the collective history lost to the flames. Making sense of the lively crowd of characters and not strictly linear structure can be as confusing as sorting unbound half-burned pages, but attentive readers will be rewarded by a rare find: an epic and resoundingly lyrical refutation of totalitarianism and cruelty. (Oct.)
"It's time for reviewers and sundry pundits to quit the flattering comparisons with Lorca, Joyce and Garcia Marquez. Manuel Rivas reads like no-one else on the planet . . . one of those novels to lavish on friends. . . . Manuel Rivas' sweeping novel, translated into English for the first time, is an undoubted classic." —Scotsman
"A novelistic tour-de-force . . . hauntingly poetic use of language and light touch . . . Rivas never loses faith in the human ability to overcome the bleakest of situations." —Irish Times
"An important storyteller . . . He is sensitive and has an incredible ear, which, in his fiction, is allied to great ingenuity." —John Berger, author, Ways of Seeing, on The Carpenter's Pencil
"A beautiful novel, filled with tenderness and humanity." —Arturo Perez-Reverte, author, The Club Dumas, on The Carpenter's Pencil
"an epic and resoundingly lyrical refutation of totalitarianism and cruelty."—Publishers Weekly
"As vivid as Orhan Pamuk, as learned as Alvaro Mutis, Rivas writes magnificently, and Dunne’s translation will take one’s breath away on nearly every page."—Booklist
Award-winning Galician author Rivas (Vermeer's Milkmaid and Other Stories) illuminates the horrors and aftermath of the Spanish civil war via a 1936 book burning in Coruña's Maria Pita Square by Franco's Falangists that destroys the city's intellectual life for a generation. His is a tapestry of fragmentary glimpses into the lives of the book burners—Olinda the laundress; Vicente Curtis, aka Hercules "Whoreson"; tango singer Luís Terranova; bagpipe-player Francisco Crecente, aka Polka, who is forced to rake up and bury the charred remains of the books; and a future judge who pokes around the flaming tomes trying to rescue one he knows is worth money. Even the despised Francisco Franco weighs in. Franco was a Galician himself, born into a naval family but too short to join the navy; Rivas notes how, once Franco attained power, his favorite outfit was the full-dress uniform of a naval officer. VERDICT Masterfully translated by Dunne, this book, with its various narrative voices and chronological fluctuation, is a challenge that rewards the reader's perseverance with a remarkably satisfying resolution.—Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland
