Ordesa
A Novel
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
”A meditation on yearning, solitude, and self; a soul storm, a mirage of phantom figures . . . a book of deep reckoning.” —The New York Times Book Review
The #1 international bestselling phenomenon—a profound and riveting story of love, loss, and memory.
A man at a crossroads in the middle of his life considers the place where he’s from, and where his parents have recently died. In the face of enormous personal tumult, he sits down to write. What follows is an audacious chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his life’s trials, failures, and triumphs that becomes a moving look at what family gives and takes away.
With the intimacy of a diarist, he reckons with the ghosts of his parents and the current specters of his divorce, his children, his career, and his addictions. In unswervingly honest prose, Vilas explores his identity after great loss—what is a person without a marriage or without parents? What is a person when faced with memories alone? Already an acclaimed poet and novelist in Spain, Vilas takes his work to a whole new level with this autobiographical novel; critics have called it “a work of art able to cauterize pain.”
Elegiac and searching, Ordesa is a meditation on loss and a powerful exploration of a person who is both extraordinary and utterly ordinary—at once singular and representing us all—who transforms a time of crisis into something beautiful and redemptive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ordesa, a park deep in the Pyrenees, looms over the psyche of Spanish writer Vilas's unnamed narrator in this vibrant English-language debut. The site of the narrator's childhood vacations, Ordesa is also home to Monte Perdido "the lost mountain" a symbol for the loss of his larger-than-life father, who died 10 years earlier, when the narrator was 43. Now living alone in Barcelona, the narrator, whose mother died a year before, is divorced from his wife and estranged from his children, and clings to what he can: an unremarkable career as a writer, tenuous sobriety after years of heavy drinking, and vivid memories of his parents. Though crackling with life, his thoughts are morbid and dominated by a pervasive sense of loss, as he reflects on the erosion of bodies and familial bonds, the material and spiritual decline of the Spanish middle class, and even the loss of memory itself: "My memory constructs a catastrophic vision of the world," he narrates midway through the novel. Despite lacking a central arc, the novel hums with magnetic and lively scenes. This is an indelible portrait of a man facing the costs of a life dedicated to remembrance.
