Galego | English

Fiction

Herba moura

By Teresa Moure

About this book

“In Herba Moura, we are taken back to the 17th century by the hand of a contemporary character named Eines Andrade. Back then we find a human and fragile Descartes –an unknown approach to the philosopher- and two women: Christina of Sweden, the queen and Hélène Jans, a friendly witch living in Amsterdam. Through this set of texts (letters, poems, recipes, herbariums) the author, as if she used a compendium of literary styles and using such different resources as the letter, diary, essay, poetry, direct style, etc, builds an amazing novel in terms of style without using unnecessary lyricism or sentiment, that has taken Galician novels to a higher ground. “Herba Moura” is a praise of passion: passion in love, and of course other types of passions such as the love for knowledge, friendship, motherhood, reading and words. This is a novel that speaks critically about the situation of women in history and gives them back their voice.

Book fragment

This spring Stockholm does not seem to wake up from its winter sleep. There are still no birds, let alone flowers or butterflies, trees are still naked and one could even tell that days refuse to grow longer after such a hard winter as the one we had in these good northern lands. It is getting dark in Stortorget square, in the city centre. Though it is only five in the afternoon, there is an ochre tincture in the whole neighbourhood that loses intensity and in a few minutes it will be as matt as the waters under the bridges, as grey as the waters that have just gone past, as cold as the waters that are now running towards the sea and in it in a few minutes. With such a stage, with such a landscape, so withering and with the cold wind on their faces, the pedestrians, the thoughts are inevitably sad. “We will not see the waters of the same river going past twice”. Because Stortorget is a square between bridges and on top of it all, a sad square, linked to the violence of life. Though nobody can tell this for certain, in another time Stortorget was the setting of a crime the people of Stockholm called “Blood bath”.