Ildefonso Falcones: Cathedral of the Sea

Tom Gaisford reviews Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea.

Cathedral of the Sea is as sculpted and fluid a tale as the image conjured up by its picturesque title. Originally written in Spanish, the international bestseller appears now in an impressively graceful translation which captures beautifully the archaic and lyrical tone of the narrative. Drawing on the chronicle of Pedro III, Ildefonso Falcones's first and lengthy novel steals us away into darkest 14th- century feudal Catalonia, a period defined by serfdom and subjugation, by iniquitous laws and by their brutal enforcement.

Because of his relative wealth, the peasant farmer Bernat Estanyol almost succeeds in breaking this mould. However, while celebrating his wedding day in the late September sun, the appearance of three men on horseback and their retinue signals a rapid end to any such aspiration. Exercising his feudal rights, Llorenc de Bellera, the Lord of Navarcles, whisks Bernat's new bride upstairs and rapes her. In order to pre-empt responsibility for "any future bastards", Navarcles then forces the groom himself to repeat the act on pain of being flayed alive.

Within a year of this opening act of savagery, in which our hero, Arnau, is conceived, he and his mother are abducted by Navacles' men. The grim cruelty of this young family's situation is set against a sense of timeless oppression, so systemic that it verges on the mundane: "Bernat peered at the cloud of dust trailing off towards the horizon, and then looked over at the two oxen, stolidly chewing on the ears of corn they had been trampling over and over." In this way Falcones draws a parallel between the plight of the peasant community and the corn on which all elements of society depend: both serve merely to be crushed and exploited.

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Spanish Literature

Albert Sánchez Piñol: Pandora in the Congo

Christian House reviews Albert Sánchez Piñol's Pandora in the Congo.

It's no surprise that in these confused metro-sexual times a resistant force should be celebrating the kind of manly yarns mastered by Victorian and Edwardian popular novelists. The fatalistic trajectories of military endeavours and grand expeditions have gripped a new brace of writers. The late, lamented George MacDonald Fraser may have headed off to the great barracks in the sky but plenty, from Mark Gatiss to James Delingpole, have picked up the regimental colours and stood their ground. It's back to the days of mutton-chop whiskers and billiard-room brawls, when men were men and women learnt needlepoint.

Front of ranks is Albert Sánchez Piñol whose wonderfully spooky debut novel Cold Skin was an icy tour de force. For his follow up, Pandora in the Congo, he shifts his focus from the Antarctic wastelands to the jungles of central Africa; the action playing out as the world caves in to the madness of the Great War.

Marcus Garvey (not the Marcus Garvey, Piñol likes to play around with famous names) is the half-Balkan, half-English manservant attending William and Richard Craver. The Cravers are the spoilt, malevolent offspring of one of the army's greatest heroes. They aimlessly lounge in the shadow of their father's fame until William, the cleverer and more callous of the pair, devises a plan to mine the undiscovered depths of the Congo. Marcus is cajoled into helping them through the inner capillaries of the heart of darkness, all the way "to a latitude empty of men".

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Spanish Literature

Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night

Peter Conrad reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

Swift imagined books battling. In a library described in one of his satires, the volumes do not remain on the shelves but hurl themselves across the room in an exchange of insults and fisticuffs, enacting their disagreements by tearing one another's pages out. What happens, however, when the lights go out? Those belligerent books probably settle down to make love and breed other books. Writers write because they are compulsive readers and they do so in book-lined rooms. Forget about art imitating life: literature is a self-generating, self-referring activity.

The Argentinian bibliophile Alberto Manguel, whose books include A History of Reading, is an expert on this snugly closed circle, symbolised by the private library he has installed in a 15th-century barn in the Loire. Here he sits, preferably at night, with the 'shapeless universe' outside expunged by darkness. Warmed by the pools of light that spill from his lamps, he does not even need to read: the smell of the wooden shelves and 'the musky perfume of the leather bindings' is enough to pacify him and prepare him for sleep. Although the softly sifting 'plankton of dust' shed both by the crinkled pages and his drying skin anticipate a longer sleep, he does not mind. Libraries are storeyed tombs and Manguel is happy to be housed in the funereal stacks.

Within his global, multilingual book collection, he can effortlessly travel in both time and space. He admits the megalomania of the enterprise: it recalls both the hubris of the Tower of Babel, felled by a resentful God, and the acquisitive mania of the library at Alexandria, accidentally torched when Caesar set fire to his own ships. Behind these imperious ventures, and behind Manguel's life-long scavenging in second-hand shops, lies a desire to demonstrate the unity of phenomena, the indexed connection between disparate experiences and the accessibility of all this lore to a single individual.

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Argentine Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Sophie Gorman reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

Isabel Allende is one of the best-known Latin American novelists (her most famous book The House of the Spirits was a huge international bestseller) who writes in the magic realism tradition. She is part of the Allende family from Chile, which included President Allende, but has lived for years in the US with her extended family. She now has more than a dozen novels to her name but a personal tragedy was the basis for one of her most moving books.

In December 1991, Allende's 26-year-old daughter Paula suddenly fell grievously ill and sank into a coma from which she would never wake up. Devastated as she watched her daughter die, Allende turned to storytelling as a portal to connect her to Paula and as a method to sustain her own dwindling spirit.

The result was Paula, a book of two parts; the first written during the endless hours spent roaming hospital corridors, and the second a few years later when Allende was able to step back to look at her own life, the history of her family and her country, Chile. And Allende's need to sustain her spirit and distract her grief through storytelling has led now to The Sum of Our Days, the latest part of a memoir that began with Paula.

This most personal story is, superficially at least, written as a letter to her dead daughter. It begins with a description of the family gathering to scatter Paula's ashes in a park near Allende's Californian home, where her daughter used to go on romantic walks with her husband, Ernesto.

From this jumping-off point, Allende describes all that has happened since and how life has kept going, almost despite itself. A matriarch to her extending and intricate family, Allende is also someone who experiences life more richly than most, with her every experience overflowing with emotion.

Even her dreams are psychedelic kaleidoscopes and she believes them to give true meaning to her waking life. And she carries her passionate Chilean ideas and ideals of family as a tribe with her wherever she lives.

In this book, vivid descriptions of her husband, children and friends, or her "clan" as she refers to them, are laced with a real sense of honesty and, as she turns her writer's eye inwards on herself too, she certainly doesn't shy away from baring all her own flaws. Alongside the many fights and reconciliations within her extended family that are part of her daily life, she also highlights her tantrums, her see-sawing mood swings and her inability to resist any opportunity to meddle in the tangled lives around her.

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Chilean Literature

Interview with Alberto Manguel

Boyd Tonkin interviews Alberto Manguel.

"I could hear the books screaming in their boxes," he reports. "Like everyone else, I had always lived in small places. But now that my children had left home, I thought, maybe I can indulge in having a library." In the southern Loire, he found an old priest's house with a ruined barn attached, in a neighbourhood where "the prices seemed to have frozen before the war... for the Parisians, who set the price of real estate, anything south of the Loire is Africa". A local architect transformed the wrecked barn into a sturdy home – described with envy-inducing relish in The Library at Night – for 30,000-plus books.

So what did it feel like to have them all in place? "I had the sense that something had come, not to an end, but to an age in me. It was as if you have roots for the first time; it's all here. You're somehow complete – coupled with the knowledge that the essence of a library is that it is never complete." Soon after the final tome had reached its designated spot, the barn of books began to overflow. Now they colonise the house, with one bedroom ("we call it the Murder Room") occupied by the detective fiction Manguel writes about so well. The Library at Night wittily shows how every dream of order breaks down, and "the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted". Equally, it argues that the hankering for a flawless system remains a persistent Utopian hope of homo sapiens, the classifying animal.

As a teenage bookworm, Manguel says, "I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library." The fledgling bibliophile worked during school holidays in a local bookshop, Pygmalion. Through that job, he became one of the disciples who read aloud to the blind spinner of labyrinthine, enigmatic tales acknowledged not only as Argentina's greatest writer, but as its greatest reader: Jorge-Luis Borges.

It was "an extraordinary privilege to listen to what went on in the mind of one of the great readers". Borges, blind since his early fifties, planned to write fiction again. He "wanted to see how the great masters had put together their work. So he would comment on the mechanics of the story." Yet the young reader would disagree with the sightless sage: "You have to learn to read on your own... This seems presumptuous. But there was in Borges a fascination with the description of violence and a certain prudery regarding erotic stories; he preferred sentimentalism to eroticism."

"For Borges," he recalls, "everything consisted in creating the right structure out of words; we had nothing but the words to go by. Whatever music or meaning the words carried, we had to remember that they were... untrustworthy tools." Borges would criticise the slips of every writer – including that bodger, Shakespeare.

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Argentine Literature

Argentine poet Juan Gelman received Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor the Cervantes Prize.




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Latin American Literature

Interview with Isabel Allende

Interview with Isabel Allende in The Guardian.

Allende speaks powerfully of her literary inheritance, in particular the influence of Shakespeare. She would draw the characters in a play and then cut them out, making each stand up with a match stick "so I would know what the heck was going on". Reading Shakespeare left the sediment that turned her into a writer, she says. "I love King Lear, Romeo and Juliet. You take just a little piece, even out of context and he's great. When I read it, it wasn't for its literary value. I was entertained by the story."

Her purpose as a writer, she says, is to "convey something and for that I have to trap the reader's attention. If I lose them, then what I write is lost. As a journalist you know that what you write competes with other things in the same paper. Writers often write for friends or critics, and forget readers. I feel the book and characters choose me, and if I allow enough time, they will talk. I ask myself, 'Why am I doing this'? 'Why am I writing about the Gold Rush?' [explored in her book Daughters of Fortune]. Then at the end, I realise I have been exploring something that has been related to me and my life and temperament. It's a book about a woman trapped in Victorian times, trapped in a life and a corset. She decides to confront the masculine world. She has no tools or weapons to fend for herself. She needs to dress like a man, act like a man to survive. Isn't that what my generation of feminists did? Exactly that."

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Chilean Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The King's Gold

John Spurling reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The King's Gold.

“There is now an idiotic tendency to despise action in novels,” says a literary critic in Arturo Perez-Reverte's third novel, The Dumas Club, published in 1993. He is defending Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers and its sequels against the accusation that they are not sufficiently serious. Since Perez-Reverte has made his name with elaborate intellectual thrillers in which there is plenty of action, this character is clearly speaking for his author.

The King's Gold, however, as its defiantly run-of-the-mill title suggests, has no pretensions to be intellectual. It is the fourth in a series of the adventures of Captain Diego Alatriste, a 17th-century Spanish soldier, and its plot - the covert capture of a treasure ship from the Indies - is hardly more out of the ordinary than its title.

Perez-Reverte's real interest is less in the cloak-and-dagger stuff than in the historical period. Most of the action takes place in and around Seville during the early years of Philip IV's reign. The poet Francisco Quevedo makes a few appearances, as do the king and his minister, the Count-Duke Olivares, but most of the characters are the kind of swaggering killers - big-booted, wide-hatted, long-moustached and thickly jacketed (against being stabbed) - who populate The Three Musketeers or lounge about with their pipes and flagons in genre paintings of the time. Captain Alatriste and his immediate comrades are, of course, not only seasoned toughs and brilliant swordsmen, but are also sensitive and decent men, so much so that, rather than torture a man to obtain information, the captain prefers to terrify him with a recital of what he might do and then burns his own arm to show what he is capable of.

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Spanish Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Ed King reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.

In December 1992 Isabel Allende's only daughter, Paula, died after a year-long coma. During the long hours spent at her bedside Allende wrote her first memoir, which she named after and addressed to her unconscious daughter.

In The Sum of Our Days Allende, the great matriarch of Latin American literature, picks up the conversation where she left it, telling Paula how she and her family have spent their time and, most of all, how her life has accommodated the abrupt, grief-induced onset of old age.

The overarching protagonist of Allende's memoir is her vast family in Marin County, California, where she came as an exile from the Pinochet dictatorship and has lived ever since. Like her slightly overwhelming 'tribe', Allende's narrative is sprawling and pleasingly chaotic.

She visits each family member in turn and charts the evolution of their relationships since Paula's death. We meet her lawyer husband, Willie, who campaigns for the rights of immigrant workers and looks quite like Paul Newman; her strictly Catholic daughter-in-law, Celia, who offends everybody with her strident homophobia before running off with a woman called Sally; and her indomitable mother, Abuela Hilda, who 'sees things that are invisible'.

But it's the family's spiritual life that gets the most attention.

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Chilean Literature

Ildefonso Falcones - Cathedral of the Sea

Michael Eaude reviews Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea.

In the 14th century, Catalonia's ships dominated the western Mediterranean. Its merchants opened offices in every port to Alexandria and built fabulous mansions on Barcelona's Carrer Montcada. But the empire was overstretched. Mid-century, plague halved the population. The king taxed the Jews to finance his wars and his nobles ravaged the countryside to feed the city. Peasants starved. Ildefonso Falcones's adventure novel is set just at this moment of Catalonia's greatest glory, when ostentatious wealth is barely papering over imminent collapse.

Barcelona's Santa Maria del Mar church (the cathedral of Falcones's title) was built in 54 years in this century, so quickly as cathedrals go that it is all in one style, a high, spacious, unadorned Gothic. "Its only decoration will be the light of the Mediterranean," as Falcones writes. His hero, Arnau, sees the cathedral start and lives to celebrate its completion. Some of Falcones's best pages describe the construction: the carrying of the stones from the Montjuic quarries, the raising of the giant keystones.

Just as the cathedral is a great enterprise, Arnau is a great man. Born a serf, he survives perils, saves Barcelona from Pedro the Cruel of Castile, and is made a baron. His evil enemies plot to have him imprisoned by the Inquisition. His lifelong goodness to his fellow-workers, to clients and to outcasts such as the Moors and Jews leads to a near-revolutionary uprising to free him.

Cathedral of the Sea is a formula adventure novel, its huge sales augmented by the glamour of Barcelona's reputation. It contains everything such a book requires: the evil lord raping a serf on her wedding night, summary hangings after a bread riot, long-suffering Jews, demented friars, cruel treatment of women, the vicious Margarida Puig, the beautiful and sexually voracious Aledis.

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Spanish Literature

PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize

Margaret Jull Costa's translation of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias has won The PEN/ Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize. The Maias is part of the Dedalus project with Margaret Jull Costa to translate all of Eça de Queiroz's work into English, with funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation in London and the Camões Institute and the Portuguese Book Institute in Lisbon. The Maias is the sixth book in the nine book project to be published by Dedalus and will be followed later this year by The City and the Mountains.




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Portuguese Literature

Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days

Two new reviews of Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days and an interview.

Thirteen years ago, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende published a memoir, Paula, in the form of a letter to a daughter who lay in a coma. The Sum of Our Days is a sequel, also addressed to Paula, that explains what has happened to the family since her death from porphyria, a rare blood disorder, in 1992. The author, I believe, attempts three things: She defends her use of magical realism as an emotional device, demonstrating how it operates in her everyday life as well as in her novels -- which is fascinating. She explains to her deceased daughter how she has endeavored to merge her family, her second husband's previous wives and children, and various friends and acquaintances into one big "tribe" -- which is puzzling. And she tries, all too plainly, to discredit and diminish her second husband's children -- which is disturbing.

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"Every life can be told as a novel," remarks Allende near the start of this memoir covering the years since 1992 when she lost her daughter, Paula. Written in the style of a long letter to the much-missed girl, this book about the lives of her family is told just like a novel, even beginning with a hook: "I always approach the eighth of January with trembling."

Allende, we learn, uses this date every year to start writing a new book or else risk a year of devastating bad luck. It is her grave preoccupation with superstition, tradition and spiritual enlightenment that colours and shapes this piece of autobiographical writing. The Sum Of Our Days is a book about loss, about healing; but most of all about the dynamics of a close family.

The Sum of Our Days makes frequent references to her dead daughter's spirit, which Allende believes guides her family, answering their prayers and causing good things to happen. Although to the reader this can seem misguided, even irritating, the author's grief-stricken denial of the finality of death is understandable and poignant. Her deep-rooted conviction that the living and the spirit world can interact will come as no surprise to those who read her debut 1982 novel The House Of The Spirits.

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For Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, a mother-daughter bond is something to forge and nurture daily — even after death.

Allende still writes a letter to her mother every day, a tradition that has endured for years. And before her daughter, Paula, died in 1992, Allende exchanged daily letters with both women.

Those letters are the cornerstone for Allende's memoir, The Sum of Our Days, which is a sequel to Paula, a memoir she wrote as her daughter was dying of the enzyme disorder porphyria. The latest installment updates Paula on what's happened to Allende and her family since Paula's death.

The Sum of Our Days begins in a forest where the family has gathered to scatter Paula's ashes. Allende tells NPR's Lynn Neary that returning to that difficult period wasn't hard for her.

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Chilean Literature