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Fiction

Como paxaro caído do niño

By Xosé Manuel Martínez Oca

About this book

As a consequence of her mother's death the protagonist is suddenly immersed in an inner struggle that leads her to analyse her life and the relationship to her mother and the longing for her father.

In this novel we find the contradictions that any woman may have regarding power relationships between the genders, the contradictions she has to come to terms with in order to achieve her own inner safety, in order to attain freedom and consequently personal power.

The author is a classic of Galician literature in this century; he has been awarded several prizes and he has dared to enter the mind of a woman in that effort to reach the darkest side of a person. He was awarded the IV Premio Rubia Barcia-Cidade de Ferrol for Galician language novels in 2005.

Book fragment

…It is all right, at least once it should happen: it was fate that you had to die that way, Mum. I know I am bad and that my heart is hard and that I should not be happy and I swear that I am not happy, Mum, but let us acknowledge that it was fate, at least in that way I feel peaceful. Though if I confess this to anyone the only thing they will say about me is that I am a monster. A heartless monster, who eighteen hours after burying her mother is here as if nothing had happened, sunbathing on the beach, forgetting it all, as I want to forget the eternal and tedious rainy days, those of scarce and grey light, with blurred faces and wet umbrellas, now I want the past to be a summer morning with sun and rumours of the summer and not those others that suffocated my teenage years, from home to school, from school to our home, the afternoons under the umbrella of Venancio (or was it Luciano?), cold feet, a stuffed nose and cold, winter Saturdays with summer clothes that made me look more attractive, feeling cold in the disco, Sundays taking a rest with the frustration and threat of Monday and classes and homework, rain of my teenage years, nostalgia...