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Fiction

Bretaña, Esmeraldina

By Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín

About this book

Bretaña, Esmeraldina is one of the most important creative efforts of Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín. Amaury, the main character, lives in a political prison where the psychological walls are also thick and the prison of literature is also suffocating. The novel pays tribute to Jack London, Torrente Ballester and Álvaro Cunqueiro and delves on the search for identity. This is again another prison novel that follows the same direction of previous works of the same author such as Retorno a Tagen Ata but with Brittany as background. The narration develops with bright expressiveness while readers can also enjoy the gift of a singular and inimitable language. From today’s point of view, Bretaña, Esmeraldina, is part of the nouvelle romane and is built in a powerful spiral structure, a good approach to the political situation around 1987. It is also a momentous journey some of the most beautiful pages of Galician and universal literature. Anxo Angueira carefully prepared this edition with an introduction and notes.

Book fragment

And during those times the memories of something that had happened really far away from there, maybe in Brittany, used to come to my mind in full confusion; something that was staged by a pale child whose preceptor, tall and elegant, of dark cheeks and coal-black eyes, used to lead by the arm through dark passages to the room where brooms were kept and where the small victim was to suffer punishment amidst mice, horrible dreams and painful cries. Still, I never thought that things would happen the way they did, my dear Esmeraldina, that day of wild and cold rain in which I was locked in the prison in Rúa Príncipe. Those bullies of the Republican Guard, fat as bores and clumsy in their movements, pushed me inside that tiny room lit by a single reddish bulb. On a low table made of wicker I was invited to leave my beloved pictures of you, Esmeraldina, my belt, the little Portuguese money I had left, the keys to cars, doors and memories, a handful of letters of yours that I had always carried with me in the short and intense days I took part in the resistance.