Ordesa
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
‘A book of deep reckoning’ New York Times
‘Becomes a way of looking honestly at what mourning really feels like’ Guardian
A man in tumult returns to Ordesa, the small mountain town where he was born, and where his parents have recently died. He sits down to write. Newly sober, his career on the wane, his relationship with his own children strained, what he produces is a dizzying chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his life’s trials, failures and triumphs. He reckons with the ghosts of his parents, the pain of loss and, as the pages fill with words, he tries to piece together the bits of himself. What is a person without a family? What is a person when faced with memories alone?
An autobiographical novel by a Spanish literary icon, written with the intimacy of a diary, Ordesa is a beautiful, redemptive meditation on identity, grief and the passing of time.
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.
