The Wrong Blood
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- €4.49
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
On the cusp of the Spanish Civil War in a coastal village in the Basque country, three men stop off at Extarri's bar on their way to a wedding. There, a bizarre and seemingly incidental event marks the beginning of a powerful story about a bond and a secret that endures even in death.
Abandoned by her parents shortly after the outbreak of war, sixteen-year-old María Antonia Extarri is left at the mercy of the soldiers. Meanwhile, Isabel enjoys a blissful honeymoon, but just a few months later her valiant Captain is shot as a traitor. Both María and Isabel suddenly find themselves violently altered, alone, and pregnant. A crippled young doctor is the only witness to the mysterious agreement silently formed between the two desperate women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This frustrating Spanish Civil War saga, the author's first to appear in English, has neither the pulse nor the plot to sustain itself over the course of its slow, laborious, and anticlimactic denouement. Doctor F lix Castro, a lonely, endearing cripple, has been observing his neighbors for years and eagerly strikes up a conversation when a young lawyer, Miguel Goitia, comes to stay in the villa of Las Cruces, which his grandmother has mysteriously bequeathed to her miserly maid, Mar a Antonia. Premonitions, superstitions, and otherworldly manifestations guide or thwart the characters on their respective quests, while their profound motivations remain cryptic. The novel, which sashays between stilted exchanges involving Doctor Castro and the bland Goitia, and sometimes harried wartime recollections, manages some highly evocative descriptions of the Basque countryside and a number of astute characterizations. Unfortunately, the narrative suffers from a ceaseless supply of ponderous asides and a cumbersome translation that prefers a rigid fidelity to the original text over a smooth reading experience.
