August 1, 2022
Rivas (The Carpenter’s Pencil) offers a tender requiem for a venerable Spanish bookstore. In 2014, Terranova proprietor Vincenzo Fontana, facing eviction and the liquidation of his shop’s stock, looks back over his long life, recalling his internment as a child in an iron lung due to polio; his salad days as a pill-popping, Bowie-worshipping rocker and antifascist agitator in the 1970s under Franco; the store’s founding by his writer father, Amaro, who takes the pseudonym Polytropos from Homer’s Odyssey; and the tall tales of his mercurial Uncle Eliseo. Especially poignant is his account of dissident girl Garua, who takes refuge in the store from the agents of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. Literary and political history regularly intertwine: as dictatorships and revolutions come and go, the store is raided by secret police amid discussions of Andre Breton and walk-ons by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges. Terranova comes to encapsulate histories both personal and national, a vantage point to glimpse the melancholy and ecstasy of the characters and their culture. As Rivas narrates, “we are what we read. But it could just as easily be said that we are what we don’t read.” This hits the spot, both as a love letter to and postmortem of the world of ideas.
August 15, 2022
A bookstore's closing takes on deeper meaning in the latest novel by Galician author Rivas. Rivas' scrupulous prose eddies around a host of silences: silences inherent in a family, a nation, and a man hoping to contend with his memories. Vicenzo Fontana is the bookstore owner and intrepid narrator--the reader moves rapidly and arbitrarily through time via his bibliographic mind, which seems to be searching for an understanding it never fully achieves. We meet Fontana as he's preparing to close down his store, then follow him backward: into childhood and into Spanish history, which looms over the novel like a fog. Fontana's family bookstore acts as one of history's quiet stages; most memorably, it serves as a sanctuary for a young woman as she hides from the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. Fontana, who as a youth spent time in an iron lung due to polio, can't help but reach toward his shelves again and again, searching for the literature that might settle his heart and keep the many brutalities of the larger world at bay. Fontana's father (nicknamed Polytropos) and uncle Eliseo are significant figures in the narrative, men whose lives shape Fontana's understanding of the world. Silence and emptiness could be considered two other central characters, the way they work and their ever present nature in any place where freedom is not total. The book itself feels constantly aware of language's many shortcomings as well as its necessity. Rivas' sentences are aflame with philosophy and well-wrought beauty; beauty that, at times, supersedes the narrative itself. Rogers' translation from the original Galician is lucid and musical. Some readers might feel unsatisfied with the novel's lack of cohesion, but it might also make them consider what undergirds the expectation of cohesion in a text. As beautifully incongruous as a human mind.
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