'Bibliopoly' Victoria Heryet; acrylic on canvas
An unusual, charming, and gripping novel about a bookshop, and if you're wondering how a story about a bookshop can be gripping, this one is located in Galicia, Spain and was founded during Franco's brutal dictatorship by supporters of the Republic, and has sheltered forbidden people, books, and ideas in its warren of rooms through the years. But when the book opens it's 2014 and the shop is being forced to close, and this time the thugs are greedy real estate speculators.
Vicenzo Fontana, son of the founders, current owner, and our narrator, is elderly and walks with crutches, a consequence of childhood polio. As he looks out to sea and watches a couple down on the rocks collecting barnacles, he thinks that instead of the sign he put in the window of Terranova, 'Total liquidation of all inventory due to imminent closure' he should write, 'Liquidation due to death of owner'. Vicenzo's mind moves between the scene in front of him and his thoughts and memories, which float hither and yon and back again.
I can picture the eyes poring over the last of the books, weighing their value, their health, color, musculature, and the state of their spines, meanwhile the books are in a state of shock as they feel the ground vanish out from under them.
The memories include the time in the 1970s when as a young man he felt he had to get away from the bookshop and his father, and moved to Madrid where he wrote songs for a group called The Urchins, walked around dressed like the White Duke, was involved with anti-fascist agitation, saw Franco's funeral, and met Garúa. Garúa is a woman with many names, she is on the run from the military dictatorship in her native Argentina and they meet because of a contraband book Vicenzo is reading. She is another in the line of people the family and Terranova give shelter to. It's dangerous, the Spanish and Argentinian authorities work hand-in-glove to destroy those they don't like. She becomes a part of this family the authorities have continually harassed over the years.
Vicenzo's father is Amaro, nicknamed Polytropos at university because of his knowledge of the Odyssey.
…Amaro was, at that time, a secondary school teacher of Greek and Latin and, more importantly, a member of the so-called Star Generation, not to mention being an active collaborator in the Seminary of Galician Studies, a collective of young researchers spanning every field imaginable…
Along with Henrique Lira, a childhood friend and stonemason who is nicknamed Atlas, and Eliseo Ponte, who is one of his students, Amaro spends his weekends on archeological dig sites doing work for the Seminary, one of the organizations in Galicia dedicated to freethinking and understanding the region's history.
The other photo is smaller but portrays a big group of men and women. A meeting of the Seminary of Galician Studies. Various minuscule symbols hang over their heads: dot, circle, cross. The stigmata of fate. Prison, exile, death.
Eliseo's sister, Comba, aspires to own a bookshop. Their father, Antón, worked on fishing boats that went up to Newfoundland where the working conditions were terrible and doing side jobs to set aside savings. Later when the bookshop is opened in 1946 with the help of those savings, it's named Terranova, the Galician name for Newfoundland in honor of Antón. Several years earlier, Amaro had been tossed out of the teaching profession by one of Franco's Purging Committees, Amaro and Comba marry in 1947, and Eliseo joins them in the bookshop. The men have to spend several years as 'moles', hiding away from the authorities, often within Terranova itself.
There are memories of the many 'folks from Abroad' who carried banned books and foreign titles hidden in their luggage and news about what was happening elsewhere, or refrigerated trucks from Paris with books from Ruedo Ibérico, an anti-Franco publisher. Other memories surface about the polio outbreak and Vicenzo's time in an Iron Lung when his Uncle Eliseo visited in the evening and told stories, rather odd stories in the circumstances, but the man was a surrealist. Vicenzo's time in the Iron Lung also began the time of silences between father and son that only grew as time went on before Vicenzo left for Madrid. When he returns, it's with Garúa.
In 2014 another young woman finds a place at Terranova when she needs it, not for political reasons this time, but because of a dangerous situation nevertheless. As has happened at other times in the bookshop's history the thugs show up, but those who are a part of the place defend it as they always have. Like altars in churches that offered sanctuary in previous centuries to anyone who reached them, the bookshop is a refuge. Contraband books are slipped between other covers and hidden right under the authorities's noses, people are hidden behind walls, and in silences stories lurk.
Emptiness grows, but due to its nature no one notices its reign until they find themselves trapped inside it. The eviction of souls, the cheapening of the imagination, the loss of oxygen. Bookstores that act as nurseries, workshops that buzz and sing, insurgent art magazines, these are the antibodies of a free culture, antibodies that enrage emptiness.
Amaro, Eliseo, Comba, and Vicenzo are all storytellers in one way or another, and floating through all of their stories are other storytellers from obscure Galician writers to Jorge Luis Borges. The names that weave through the novel are an entire education of Galician, Central and South American, Spanish, and Portuguese writers and artists. Vicenzo writes songs in his head throughout his life, Amaro has an infinite number of stories for others, but his true stories are written down in his secret journals, Mnemosyne in Hispania. Comba is a down-to-earth teller of stories and listener, Eliseo tells his unforgettable stories, but his own story lurks behind them.
When he spoke, Eliseo was like a squirrel in a walnut tree. He would leap from the trunk and proceed to hop from branch to branch as if he were never going to return to his initial story. But he always returned. Or almost always.
Manuel Rivas has written a magical butterfly of a book flitting back and forth in time and from subject to subject, and full of charm as though to spite the thugs encountered of whatever stripe. From a quiet opening it slowly builds until it becomes as page-turning as a thriller. It might just be the ultimate book about books and was the perfect note to end my reading year on.
(The Last Days of Terranova is translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers and was published by Archipelago Books this year; it was originally published in Galicia in 2015.)
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