The Last Days of Terranova
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
A far-reaching story of an outcast and his bookstore: a home to forbidden books, political dissidents, and cultural smugglers all brought to vivid poetic life
“Rivas is a master… His pages bloom like flowers, swerving in unpredictable arcs toward a light-source that is constantly moving.” —Bookforum
The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it's set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitive histories.
Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo's childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away from the bookstore as possible, in Madrid.
Like the bookstore itself, The Last Days of Terranova is a space crammed with stories, histories, and literary references, and as many nooks, crannies, and complexities, brought to life in Rivas’s vital prose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rivas (The Carpenter's Pencil) offers a tender requiem for a venerable Spanish bookstore. In 2014, Terranova proprietor Vincenzo Fontana, facing eviction and the liquidation of his shop's stock, looks back over his long life, recalling his internment as a child in an iron lung due to polio; his salad days as a pill-popping, Bowie-worshipping rocker and antifascist agitator in the 1970s under Franco; the store's founding by his writer father, Amaro, who takes the pseudonym Polytropos from Homer's Odyssey; and the tall tales of his mercurial Uncle Eliseo. Especially poignant is his account of dissident girl Garua, who takes refuge in the store from the agents of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. Literary and political history regularly intertwine: as dictatorships and revolutions come and go, the store is raided by secret police amid discussions of Andre Breton and walk-ons by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges. Terranova comes to encapsulate histories both personal and national, a vantage point to glimpse the melancholy and ecstasy of the characters and their culture. As Rivas narrates, "we are what we read. But it could just as easily be said that we are what we don't read." This hits the spot, both as a love letter to and postmortem of the world of ideas.
