In The Wilderness
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A glorious cast of animals and birds, as well as humans, relate the magical stories that form the plot of Manuel Rivas's extraordinary novel. An old lady, Misia, tells how the 300 ravens of Xallas are the warrior-poets of the last King of Galicia. A priest, Don Xil, explains to a peasant girl, Rosa, that the beautifully carved women in the local church are not saints, but represent the seven deadly sins. A mouse, Matac-ns, a poacher in his previous life, is chased by a cat, the bagpiper and anarchist, Arturo of Lousame. A bat, Gaspar, relates his own death to a lizard. In a nearby cellar, half the parish are found to have transmigrated into spiders, snails, toads-Manuel Rivas's story emerges like spirals of smoke, in a series of memorably poetic images. His characters have their roots deep in the traditions, legends and history of his beloved Galicia. Few contemporary storytellers share his power of vision and sense of cultural identity, or can narrate their tales with such tenderness and humour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spain's legendary past returns to critique its prosaic present in this haunting novel. Journalist and novelist Rivas (The Carpenter's Pencil) tells an episodic tale about the inhabitants of Ar n, a Galician village fading into contemporary amnesia. The elliptical story revolves around an unhappy housewife, her callous, mercenary husband, her mute brother a latter-day knight errant who listens to his Walkman as he gallops through the countryside on horseback and an elderly noblewoman, Misia, repository of the village's cultural memory and her own bittersweet reminiscences of loves lost. Observing and commenting on their travails are the souls of dead villagers who have returned as animals, including a mouse who used to be the village priest, now stalked by a cat who is the embodiment of the erstwhile village anarchist, and a crow who presides over, and occasionally intervenes in, events on behalf of the ancient king of Galicia. Rivas's delicate, restrained magical realism, limpidly translated, deploys Galician folklore to lend a mythic resonance to Spain's painful passage from rural life to urban modernity. The result is a poignant, lyrical meditation on the disenchantments of history.
