Book Review: The Wrong Blood by Manuel De Lope

Title: The Wrong Blood
Author: Manuel De Lope
Publisher: Other Press
Genre: Literary Fiction, Translation
PP: 304 Pages
ISBN: 9781590513095
Price: $14.95
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

There must be something about the way Spanish literature translates into English. Manuel De Lope’s writing kept making me think of the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is very stately and a bit formal but it is also very entertaining and not to be missed.

The story takes place during the Spanish Civil War and then fifty or so years later. The main characters are Dr. Castro, wealthy aristocrat, Isabel Herraiz, Peasant Girl, Maria Antonia Etzarri and Isabel’s grandson, Goitia Herraiz. The women lived together for years, in Isabel’s home. Also, part of the household is Veronica Herraiz, who will become Goitia’s mother. Dr. Castro lives in the house next door to Isabel and Maria Antonia and was the doctor who delivered Isabel’s daughter. On the surface, everthing seems pretty straight forward except for a secret that Isabel, Dr. Castro and Maria Antonia share.

Goitia comes to his grandmother’s house to study for the Civil Law Notary Exams. It is his presence which initiates memories in the mind of the doctor. He remembers the wedding of Isabel and her soldier husband, Julen and the terrible tragedy which left Isabel a new bride and young widow and pregnant with her husband’s child. Maria Antonia experiences her own tragedies during the war when she was raped and misused by Facist soldiers who commandeered her family’s inn. Shamed and confused, she is left to make her own way and is taken in by a family friend of Isabel’s. She is trained as a cook and eventually is hired by Isabel to be her cook and companion. The decades long relationship between the women causes Isabel to leave Maria Antonia her home when Isabel dies. Goitia has asked permission to study at Las Cruces, as it is named, at the bidding of his mother. Maria Antonia agrees, and they spend two months together with the young man studying and the old women taking care of him.

The story of these people is rolled out carefully and well by De Lope. Along with the story of the main characters is a background description of the Spanish Civil War. Although he doesn’t go into depth about the war, we can see the story of this terrible conflict which we have been acquainted with previously in Picasso’s “Guernica; Hemingway;s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and Lorca’s poetry and his biography by Ian Gibson. We get a flavor of the trauma of the Spanish as they lived through the war which has been called “The Dress Rehearsal for World War II”.

In terms of the writing, the direction of the plotline is a bit obvious once you begin reading, but that hardly matters in the long run. I only rarely find an author whose prose is so eloquent that I want to read the book again just to appreciate its beauty. And considering this is a translated version, well, I can only imagine how absolutely wonderful it must be in the original Spanish. The story is paced very well; it starts a bit slow, setting the overall tone immediately, while allowing the reader to absorb and appreciate small details that might otherwise be overlooked. The sense of time and place is evoked largely through the use of flashbacks, which take the reader seamlessly and skillfully through the hardships of war into the present and back again, without causing any interruption to the overall flow of the story. It is a book that will you find difficult to put down until the very end.

I highly recommend this book. Even though De Lope has written a number of other successful novels, this is the first one which has been translated into English and John Cullen has done a marvelous job as translator. I hope he will do more of De Lope’s work. This is not a book to read in a weekend. However, I found myself being drawn back to it to sneak yet another page or so in odd minutes. It was a great experience. I hope you will read it also.

You can purchase the book on Flipkart here

Book Review: Enough About Love by Herve Tellier

Title: Enough About Love
Author: Herve Tellier
Publisher: Other Press
Genre: Literary Fiction, Translation
PP: 240 pages
ISBN: 9781590513996
Price: $14.95
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Thomas loves Louise, a lawyer. Louise is married to Romain, a scientist. Louise loves Thomas. Yves, a writer, loves Anna. Anna, a psychiatrist, loves Yves, a man she found “unsettling.” Anna is married to Stan, an ophthalmologist. Thomas is Anna’s psychoanalyst. No, this isn’t an LSAT logic problem or a torrid soap opera. These are the characters that comprise Le Tellier’s urbane, au courant Paris comedy, a droll romp that is nevertheless intimate and complex within the playful pages. It’s packed with contagious quotes that you want to spread:

“Everyone should have analysis. It should be compulsory, like military service used to be.”

Or, let’s say you are jealous of a woman and want to share a canny reproach with a friend:

“She sees herself as slim, lives being slim as synonymous with being rigorous. Gaining weight, she is convinced, is always a lapse.”

Lots of light, saucy bon mots flash through this story, but there are small earthquakes that convulse now and then. At 228 pages and 51 short chapters (and an epilogue), most chapters are structured in pairs, such as “Thomas and Louise” and “Anna and Yves,” alluding to couples, as well as Abkhazian dominoes, a game that is close to Yves’ heart. “He is a writer who has readers, but not a true readership.” He may obscure himself further by titling his next novel after that titular game.

Throughout the wry novel, the coupling and uncoupling of husbands, wives, and lovers overlap and cross, and sometimes meet. The themes and ideas may be common but the characters are genuine and close. The dialog is inspired, not prepared or clichéd. The prose slides creamily off the tongue, like a filled croissant, and is peppered with paradox and the double entendre, pointed aphorisms and learned allusions. And life can be turned into aphorisms, instructs Thomas to his patient, Anna, as a way of fixing life into words.

“…what attracts us about another person has had more to do with what makes them fragile…Love is kindled by the weakness we perceive, the flaw we get in through, wouldn’t you say?”

There’s a gravitas that manifests subtly, an accretion of observations and details that examine love from every curve and angle. You can visualize this dialog-heavy book as a film, or a play. There is no way not to compare Le Tellier to the best of Woody Allen–a little bit Lubitsch, a little bit Jewish, some Annie Hall, some Stardust Memories, a profusion of Freud. But this is French, and you will imagine that you are walking through Jardin du Luxembourg or running across the Quai des Grands Augustins on a grey, Paris day. It’s eclectic, though, with American as well as other infusions. The savvy prose serves up a savory atmosphere, drifting through outdoor cafés and public squares. Some of the time, though, you are indoors, near a bookcase, and often a bed…

Cultural icons, such as François Truffaut, are included, not just as a reference, but as meaning to the story at hand. Thomas emails Louise, after they first meet, that doesn’t a scene in Stolen Kisses anticipate the future of email? But the scene he shares, in detail, is the buttering of his desires.

There is even a postmodernish, double-column chapter; on one side is Yves’ dry, but increasingly inventive lecture of the word “foreign,” with emphasis on the fact that the French have only one word for it, l’etranger. Juxtaposed on the other side is the cuckolded Stan, seated in the back row, agonized in a stream of invective consciousness. The linguistic stunt work by the author is more than a showcase; it concludes in a probing, poignant place of alarm and discovery.

The characters in these triangular love affairs share universal elements– sex and death, guilt and virtue, grief and ecstasy, illusion and certainty, passion and ennui. And, of course, love. But enough about love.

Eminent credit goes to Adriana Hunter for her luminous translation from the French.