The Threads of the Heart
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A nineteenth century Spanish seamstress flees her village for Morocco in a novel with “a magical realist aspect . . . An epic sweep and a richness of characterization” (The Independent).
They say Frasquita is a healer with occult powers; that perhaps she is even a sorceress. Indeed, she has a remarkable gift, one that has been passed down to the women in her family for generations. From mere rags, she can create gowns and other garments so magnificent, so alive, that they mask any defect or deformity. They bestow a blinding beauty on whoever wears them.
But Frasquita’s gift makes others in her small Andalusian village jealous. And when her gambling husband brings misfortune on their family, Frasquita travels across southern Spain and into Africa with her five children in tow. Her exile becomes a quest for a better life, and a way to free her daughters from the fate of her family of sorcerers.
“Like the beautiful frescoes of García Márquez, this novel is a marvelous and lyrical fairytale bursting with colorful characters” —La Revue Littéraire Des Copines
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanning southern Spain to Algeria, this mythic family tale follows a roving band of women through the amazing story of magical seamstress Frasquita Carasco, who, among other miracles, uses her otherworldly powers to raise the dead. Thanks to a box containing arcane secrets passed down by her mother, Frasquita is capable of cryptic incantations that unleash primeval forces. Her daily life, however, is one of poverty and hardship. The family gambled away to a wealthy landowner by a reckless husband with a passion for cock fighting, Frasquita and her children eventually flee their miserable existence in a remote Spanish desert town, embarking on an odyssey across the mountains, where they take up with a band of revolutionaries. The multifaceted panoply of terrifying or inspiring characters who inhabit this harsh, mystical universe from a crafty, pontificating pedophile who is also a skilled physician to a Catalan anarchist leader whose ravaged face Frasquita must reconstruct are worthy of the very best of M rquez or even the darkest Garc a Lorca. The author's prose is perfectly calibrated, riffing seamlessly between the enchanting lyricism of Frasquita's matrilineal clan and far more somber realities. Frasquita's daughter, Angela, was born with chicken feathers and a voice that can stir clergymen into lustful passions or raise the downtrodden masses. Like the desert that occupies so much of Martinez's mesmerizing narrative, the author's prose is uncompromising, stark, and often brutal: "The people were roaring beneath the child's voice, and the captain was asking his questions, and the guard was cutting Salvador's face, gashing the cheeks, digging into the lines, attacking the muscle, widening the mouth, carving the features." Recurring themes, like ostracism and social injustice in short the intolerable atrocities perpetuated by human beings on their own kind are deftly and fluently addressed throughout this sad and magnificent debut. Martinez has crafted a singular and engrossing masterpiece of magical realism that stretches even the virtually limitless boundaries of the genre.
