Galego | English

Fiction

Os libros arden mal

By Manuel Rivas

About this book

This novel encompasses the period from 1881 until our days, between the death of George Borrow until that of an old Galician anarchist called Polca. This is a novel with plenty of characters inhabiting it, a novel that could have a tattoo with that famous warning from Luís Vives to Erasmus: “We can neither speak or keep quiet without danger”. The most important character in this book is language, the words that are part of the body, same as the bones, the eyes and the fingers. The fight between the words meant to dominate and the failing words. Between the language of a totalitarian regime and the language that survives in the shadows. The language of war and the Dyonisian pulse of popular language. The dogmatic language of religion and the carnal and erotic language of Carnival. This novel strives to see, through an internal path, through gaps, in a subtle and non dogmatic way, the unexplained in history. The structure of the novel is like an armillary sphere made up of different orbits in which the planets, apart from human lives, are books, belongings, animals, plants, and words, they themselves moving same as living beings.

Book fragment

I am annoyed at first. He is young. I don’t know him. It happens sometimes. They get in-between. I was paying attention to the tango singer. That boy who came to the stage invited by Pucho Boedo, the one in the Orquestra Oriente. With a white suit and a red scarf around his neck. With you, a friend who brings the voice of the sea rocked by the light of the lighthouse: Luís Terranova. How handsome. And he was even more handsome when he started singing. He didn’t look childish any more. He was now looked boney, a strongly etched figure. It was Chessman, the tango of a man sentenced to death. I had never heard anybody singing a tango like that. It sounded as if he had just written it, as if he had just thought of it right then. Ya son las diez, suena el reloj, un paso doy, voy a mi Dios. Mira por onde, a hora cadraba. That was during the festival of San Pedro de Nós. Now I’m not sure, but I think that even the musicians stopped playing. That summer, with Ana and Amalia, I went through all the festivals with the hope of hearing him again, but we never heard of him again. I used to sing that tango by the river, Los libros son mis pasos, calvario del Señor, la silla mi descanso, que el mundo deparó, and like that, insisting, with feeling, I could write his figure on the water. I know it is a trick. But I also have the right to imagine figures. And not just wait until they come. Like this one. It came on its own.