The Carpenter's Pencil
A Novel of the Spanish Civil War
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed Galician author’s novel of the Spanish Civil War is “a sincere and beautiful portrait of a brutal, ugly period of Spanish history” (The Guardian).
Novelist and El País journalist Manuel Rivas has been heralded as one of the brightest in a new wave of Spanish authors. Originally written in Galician, his native language, The Carpenter’s Pencil was a bestseller in Spain and has been published in nine countries.
Set in the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, The Carpenter’s Pencil charts the linked destinies of Dr. Daniel Da Barca, a Republican who cheats death in General Franco’s prisons; Herbal, an illiterate Falangist and Da Barca’s shadow; and an unnamed painter with the carpenter’s pencil, the man who unites them in life and death. It is also the story of Marisa Mallo, loved by both Da Barca and Herbal; Pepe Sánchez, the bolero singer; “Genghis Khan,” the wrestler; and the legend of two estranged sisters, Life and Death.
All of these and more are bound by the events of the war. And all are rendered, in Rivas’s skillful hand, with the power of the carpenter’s pencil, a pencil that draws both the measured line and the artist’s fanciful vision.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dr. Daniel Da Barca is a Republican hero of the Spanish Civil War, an almost folkloric figure at the center of this lyrical though frequently impenetrable import. His story is related, in the spirit of Cervantes's Exemplary Tales, in a bar, by a Galician brothel keeper to a favorite whore. Da Barca's politics and philosophy stem from what his teacher, Dr. N voa Santos, calls "the theory of intelligent reality" that irony and lyricism are organic parts of the human condition. Even before Franco's uprising, Da Barca's movements were tracked by a soldier named Herbal a man who conceals his moral susceptibility beneath a shell of brutality. In the first days of the war, Da Barca, along with other Republican notables, is imprisoned in Santiago. One of his fellow prisoners is a painter who is taken out and killed by a group including Herbal. On the way back, Herbal, who has picked up the carpenter's pencil that the painter had been using in prison, hears a voice in his head it is the voice of the deceased, who makes Herbal into the unwilling vessel of Da Barca's salvation. Twice Da Barca is taken out to be shot, and twice he is saved by Herbal, who later arranges for the doctor's transfer from the harsh prison at Coru a to the less rigorous camp at Porta Coeli, from which he manages to direct a Republican resistance group. Although Rivas's (Butterfly's Tongue) highly charged language is sometimes excessive and the narrative convoluted, his instinctive balancing of Da Barca's heroism against Herbal's brutish plebian consciousness creates a work of endearing nobility that will reward the patience of what is likely to be a very small American audience.
