The father is unpredictable, jealous, erratic, violent and on the verge of madness. The mother is powerless, anxious, loving, terrified ... and pregnant. The boy oscillates between both parents, happy to be taken for an adult when he gets shooting lessons, feeling lost when he cannot make sense of what's happening with the adults and their environment.
Del Amo's characters are poor, also in their strength to make something of their lives. The mother reads popular romance novels in order to escape from her dreary reality. The father relives the situation he was brought up in by his own father, an equally violent despot. Both are gentle with the boy, loving even, even if both are too tied up in their own problems to really give him the environment that he needs.
Del Amo describes and brings to live the terrifying emotions of anonymous characters, in whose situation we are dropped with direct experience of every minute action that each of them makes, full of physical power and virtuose language, and further strengthened by the use of the simple present, which gives the reader to be part of the action as it unfolds in all its dramatic and tragic plot. I am used to read in French, I hear French all the time, but I must admit that many phrases contain words that I now read for the first time. His language is rich, but his style is direct, including in the dialogues.
The novel is a kind of update of Greek tragedy. Even if the end was not predicted (by Cassandra or some character), every reader knows from the start that things will not end well. The fact that the characters don't have names even strengthens the abstract theme of returning generational violence. It is Del Amo's strength that he made his descriptions tangibly concrete to make us live the experience.
Highly recommended!
No comments:
Post a Comment