Under the Gypsy Moon
A Novel
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- 35,00 kr
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- 35,00 kr
Publisher Description
“Beautifully lyric . . . [Lawrence Thornton’s] prose is finely honed and his touch sure.”—Chicago Tribune
The year is 1936. The tide of fascism is overwhelming Europe. In Spain the Guardia Civil wages war on the citizens. Spanish-German novelist Joaquín Wolf leaves his adopted home in Paris for a short visit to Spain, where he will spend an evening that will change his life. For there he meets the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and in two brief hours they forge a close friendship. Within days Lorca is dead, executed by the civil guard, an event that sets Wolf on an irrevocable course as he joins the struggle against Franco.
Wounded, Wolf returns to France to find German fascism threatening the city he loves. Banding together with a fiercely political group of writers named the Lorca Club, he again becomes a soldier of the resistance—this time using his most potent ammunition: words.
Through the Lorca Club he meets Ursula Krieger, another exiled Berliner living in Paris, a survivor not only of war but of the bloodless horrors of postwar life. Though the scars of her past keep her from reaching out to him, Wolf’s quiet, steadfast love vanquishes shame and pain. And while Lorca taught Wolf what must be fought against, even to the death, it is Ursula who teaches him what is worth fighting—and living—for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thornton's ( Imagining Argentina ) distinctive gift as a novelist--his ability to compellingly evoke the era of which he writes and to create characters whose lives epitomize a critical period of history--is again manifestly evident in this work, set in the decade encompassing the Spanish Civil War and WW II. Here he tells the story of two writers--one real, one fictitious--who succumb to the forces of fascism but whose works transcend their time and place to speak eternal truths. A chance meeting with the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca transforms the destiny of Joaquin Wolf, a half-Spanish, half-German novelist. Lorca's murder by the Guardia Civil and Joaquin's own experiences in the bombing of Guernica are the first in a chain of events in which both writers' livesstet lives per sss take on a mesmerizing similarity. The narrator, Joaquin's lover, Ursula Krieger, recognizes that Lorca's poem Romance Son ambulo has an uncanny relevance to the tragic experiences she recounts. In the novel's denouement, the poem also supplies a union of insight and faith. delete? yes, probably. I'd like to see the whole thing again after it's cleaned, and then decide. Thornton's prose is illuminated by sharply visual, surrealistic metaphors. His interwoven plot lines are ingeniously conceived and developed, but the portentously monotonous voice of the narrator, while appropriate to her haunted personality, in some respects distances the reader from the characters' emotions. Still, this book should be read for the searing intensity of Thornton's imagination.