A Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.
![]() ![]() ![]() to e-mail us: ![]() support the site |
Cremation general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
- Return to top of the page -
Our Assessment:
A- : a strong novel of modern Spain and its rapid post-Franco changes See our review for fuller assessment.
Review Consensus: - Return to top of the page - The complete review's Review:
Cremation is set in the fictional Spanish town of Misent on the Mediterranean coast on a single day -- the day when Matías Bertomeu is to be cremated.
Death is a time for reflection, and Cremation rotates through a cast of family and acquaintances reflecting on Matías' life and their own in what becomes a large-scale study of contemporary Spain and Spanish life and society.
What makes us so like the Viennese is that we're standing at the edge of the abyss. Misent is like the Titanic (.....) It's the Titanic sans grandeur. We have zero intellectual production. So we are as much like the interwar Viennese as an egg is to a chestnut. We're alike only in the cheesy things, that we scratch at the seats of our pants, and a coming storm is going to swallow us whole.Rubén has not just bought into the system, he's its embodiment, doing whatever it takes -- from flouting laws to greasing palms to intimidation and taking advantage -- to build his empire. He may have once aspired, idealistically, to be an architect, but instead of building something along the lines of the Karl-Marx-Hof he's responsible for concrete monstrosities that bring to mind, for his daughter Silvia, Albert Speer. But he has embraced his role: I'm a developer. I like the technical jargon, of the forge, I like concrete, shuttering, buttresses, reinforcing rods, steel meshes, floorings, and cinder blocks. I've always known that this is where my gifts lie. [...] As a developer I'm my own boss, and the owner of my other self, the architect. An architect is the developer's employee. [...] I exert control over myself, I manage myself. I impose the principles of reality.He's been very successful -- while Matías flailed, "a despotic Stalinist shipwrecked first on idealism and then on the beach of ecology and a health food obsession that was supposed to save him in the eleventh hour from cirrhosis". The next generation has taken advantage of the new opportunities in their different ways, with Matías' son Ernesto a "free market shark" (always busy, barely flickering in the narrative), while Rubén's daughter from his first marriage, Silvia, is an art restorer who professes disdain for her father's doings and yet takes full advantage of the comfortable lifestyle it affords her. Rubén evolved (or devolved) into the magnate he has become. In the different times he grew up in, he was more idealistic; later, his first wife Silvia's mother Amparo, would travel widely with him, to see the great, inspiring art and buildings of Europe and the United States. But, as Rubén puts it, as part of growing up: "I had to silence all the noise inside, all the youthful butterfly dreams." Amparo dies, and the widower marries Maria, many decades younger; the man who read Baudelaire and Thomas Mann, and Mumford, Malraux, and Fischer now lives with a woman who instead reads: her Knights Templar trash, the crusades, secrets of the Holy Shroud and the Temple of Jerusalem, the Da Vinci Code, the Pyramid of Menkaure, the astronaut of the Palenque Temple.There's still a keen awareness among the characters of social classes, and moving between them, but the traditional rules have been upset and many of them find it difficult to navigate the new order -- though Maria slips easily into her new role. Even for Rubén, it's suggested, it was difficult to adapt -- but in fully embracing it, going all in, he managed better than those around him: It's hard to fall from the idea that you can build the world with your own two hands, of having touched the original clay, of having played with it, only to have it taken away. Rubén was the first of us to have capitulated and yet if you take a closer look, he's the only one among us who actually changed anything -- he changed everything. Wherever you look, you see what he's changed, everything that's passed through his hands is different than what itw as before. We call it devastation, but he changed the world he lives in; and though we think it's for the worse, it must certainly provide him with a sense of security. He's the only great potter among us.Among the other characters is author Federico Brouard, successful as far as reputation goes, but less so as far as making money from his writing -- "Literature professors study his work, students write their theses on it, but nobody actually buys it" -- and a man now broken by cancer. A onetime friend of Rubén's, he became a thorn in the developer's side with his refusal to sell Rubén a piece of his land that Rubén needed for a planned development, making for all sorts of complications. By the end, however, Brouard has had to sell the land, the symbolic hold-out crumbling against the forces Rubén and his time represent. (Showing also just how interwoven all these lives are, Rubén's son-in-law is a professor of comparative literature who is writing a biography of Brouard.) Cremation is a novel about remembrance, the laying to rest of a man who figured significantly in most of these characters' lives, but, as Chirbes notes: "We aren't very good at remembrance". Memory is selective, and so also they choose -- or can't help -- how to see and remember the past, in a world that has been radically transformed over their lifetimes. Chirbes' novel is a quite powerful book of testimonies and (often frustrated) experiences, an indictment of post-Franco Spain that has barreled more or less blindly (though also, in the case of Rubén, decidedly clear-eyed) ahead, damn too many of the consequences. The tight cast of characters -- even with the few looser ends, such as Matías' son, barely a presence, or Silvia's son, sent off to Edinburgh without being told his uncle has passed away -- and their relationships work quite well in support of the story, even as the dead man himself remains surprisingly far in the background much of the time. Chirbes' style, the sections each a single paragraph of often dense flow, is effective too. It makes for a powerful novel of its time and place. - M.A.Orthofer, 22 December 2021 - Return to top of the page - Cremation:
- Return to top of the page - Spanish author Rafael Chirbes lived 1949 to 2015. - Return to top of the page -
© 2021-2022 the complete review
|