An “autobiographical novel” about a middle-aged Spanish man contemplating the state of his own life, and the lives of his deceased parents and other elders. Vilas’s style — reading in translation — is straightforward and concise, which somehow feels a bit odd in an elegy. We get ruminations that… aren’t very ruminative. Late in the book comes a brief aside that seems to acknowledge this bluntness:
If that old woman were speaking English, we’d get to enjoy a scene of American realism, full of steely poetry, but in Spain, and in Spanish, and in a Zaragozan accent no less, we end up without steely poetry, without transcendence, without epic, without anything at all. We are left merely with the exoticism of the inferior bloodlines.
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