On the Edge
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
On the Edge is a monumental fresco of a brutal contemporary Spain in free fall
On the Edge opens with the discovery of a rotting corpse in the marshes on the outskirts of Olba, Spain—a town wracked by despair after the burst of the economic bubble, and a microcosm of a world of defeat, debt, and corruption. Stuck in this town is Esteban—his small factory bankrupt, his investments stolen by a “friend,” and his unloved father, a mute invalid, entirely his personal burden. Much of the novel unfolds in Esteban’s raw and tormented monologues. But other voices resound from the wreckage—soloists stepping forth from the choir—and their words, sharp as knives, crowd their terse, hypnotic monologues of ruin, prostitution, and loss.
Chirbes alternates this choir of voices with a majestic third-person narration, injecting a profound and moving lyricism and offering the hope that a new vitality can emerge from the putrid swamps. On the Edge, even as it excoriates, pulsates with robust life, and its rhythmic, torrential style marks the novel as an indelible masterpiece.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Midway through this novel, narrator Esteban says, "It's all hot air." He's talking about Internet sex chat rooms, but the phrase could also be deployed for the tone of the book hot, angry, sweaty which unfurls over nearly 500 pages. Chirbes, who passed away in August 2015, is one of Spain's premier writers, and he is at his best when fully immersed, as he is in this novel, in the enormous economic fallout of Spain's recession. The book loosely follows Esteban, who has been forced to close his carpentry shop due to a lack of business, and leaps between his feelings of failure and monologues in which he lashes out at his father, a former political dissident (and, it seems, a generally bad father) who is now in the care of his son due to his vegetative state which Esteban describes as looking like "shop-window mannequin." The book occasionally loops in third-person narratives of townspeople; the first few pages begin with the story of Ahmed and Rachid, two men left unemployed following the closure of Esteban's carpentry shop. Each small narrative embroidering Esteban's blurs in and out confusingly this is a book with only three chapters, and the middle chapter itself is more than 400 pages. Esteban's tone is wrathful and relentless as it seizes upon sex, race, and money ("Money, among its other virtues, has a detergent quality"). If Proust and an Old Testament prophet had collaborated to write about Spain's recession, it might have been something like the writing here agonized, dense, full of rage, and difficult to forget.
