5. Spain

“Books Burn Badly” – Manuel Rivas.  Translated from Galician by Jonathan Dunne.

I found this book by chance after browsing in Daunt’s bookshop in Marylebone, London; the only place I know where books are divided by country and those with a geographic reading list can search for gems with little previous knowledge.  It was a fortunate case of liking the writing over the first few pages and taking the plunge, despite some woeful english reviews on Goodreads. And I’m tremendously glad that I did.

This is not a straightforward book nor is it kind to the reader.  Like “The Milkman” (which I also read this year) the narrative is disjointed and hard to follow.  Characters will be introduced and then not mentioned for several dozen pages, making it hard to remember the names.  But staying with it, testing my memory, even go back a few chapters to check the references at times, I found it one of the most rewarding books to read.

The opening chapters deal with an event at the very start of the fascist uprising in Spain: fascist thugs, new to power in the city of Coruña, burn books looted from socialist or ‘subversive’ institutions.  We meet a group of friends, free-thinkers, working men – not all intellectuals – but all optimistic and embracing modernity, open to a nation that is not defined by the old certainties of religion, monarchy, patriotism (all the idols of which “Good Soldier Svejk” poked such fun).  The civil war is not dwelt on, but we are shown how their world is pulled apart by the Fracoist takeover. Some live, some are killed, some suffer horribly and we meet others that thrive. We follow them and their children through Franco’s Spain.

It is described as a book of short stories and I would say this is only partly correct.  There is a narrative, returning characters, interconnected lives and a sense of a complete book.  However the story is fragmented, told in glimpses, characters and key plot points revealed slowly and often incompletely.  In some ways this is frustrating, it leaves you with questions that go unanswered, but for some reason that feels entirely fitting for this book: living in a dictatorship the characters themselves may never live fully, may never reveal all, must put up a front or talk in riddles, perhaps having everything revealed is the luxury of an open society.  Maybe it is symbolic, the stories and secrets that perhaps Spain has not yet fully addressed.

There is no one character who is the main protagonist, not all characters get an ending shown to us.  There are intellectuals, a judge and bibliophile, a police enforcer who rises in the new regime. There are left-wingers whose life and potential is cut short by being born at the wrong time.  There are fantastic women: seditious artists, an elderly madame, a tough washerwoman who watches and learns and knows. The city itself is a character, we wander from the centre through its docks and edge against the hard Atlantic coast which sweeps in currents from Ireland and links the city to the world beyond.  The books stay with us, in the ashes scattered in parks, in the editions salvaged from the flames, or in the fruitless quest for a rare new testament which haunts the strait-laced judge, who covets this treasure despite being responsible for its burning. There is magical realism, romance, friendship, betrayal, even a police chase.  There are moments of supreme melancholy – witnessing the murder of subversives in the city river or chance killing of a gypsy family.

It’s a gruelling, thrilling, deep-feeling, difficult charmer of a book.  I read most of it cooped up in my friends’ beautiful Basque home in rural south-west France, with timber beams above me, a wood burner glowing in the corner and the Atlantic crashing against the coast a few miles away. I imagined Galicia – I felt – straight down the coast.  I loved it.