Ordesa
Manuel Vilas
Canongate, £11.99
Review by Stephen Phelan
WHAT a start to the year’s reading. Manuel Vilas’s Ordesa is a smack in the chops and a swim in the sea, a desolate memento mori and a warm, consoling hug. If that sounds a little blurby, you should hear the hymns that Spanish critics sang to it on publication in 2018, tears fountaining from their eyes. It sold by the truckload too, as if it were a popular thriller rather than a plotless expression of private grief, political disaffection, and existential bafflement.
Which is to say that it obviously speaks to people, and now in English too, the swells and crashes of Vilas’s wavelike syntax energetically rendered by master translator Andrea Rosenberg. The author is a former secondary school teacher, a career he summarises as 23 years of shouting: “Everybody settle down.” He quit a couple of decades ago to devote himself to literature, becoming a prolific novelist and poet, turning steely irony against the Spanish state.
Ordesa is something else though, apparently inspired by the death of his mother and the end of his marriage circa 2015. These losses made him “free” in the most frightening sense, an orphaned astronaut with a severed tether, and this book is a record of his spinning. It’s subtitled “A Novel” but reads much closer to the mode often classed as “autofiction” – personal history sprayed onto the page in a manner more like bloodletting than storytelling.
If there is structure here it’s imperceptible, almost subatomic, each numbered chapter a particle of thought orbiting the memory of Vilas’s parents. “The fact that I can never talk to them again seems to me the most outrageous phenomenon in the universe,” he writes, “a mystery as enormous as the origin of intelligent life.” A little like WG Sebald, he includes reproduced photos as metaphysical prompts. A picture of his father in a bar, taken long before Vilas’s birth, gives him the same pleasure that he imagines the angels feed upon: “You can enjoy the world more when you’re not in it.” And a little like Karl Ove Knausgaard, he invests totemic significance in material objects, from TVs, irons, water heaters, and toiletry kits to the mass-produced SEAT cars that signalled Spain’s shift toward industrial modernity during Franco’s long dictatorship.
There’s a definite Marxist bent to his sense of the national continuum over the last half-century or so, whereby neither fascism, nor monarchy, nor parliamentary democracy have ever done much for his parents, or himself, or any other member of his country’s lower-middle class – all “victims of Spain and the desire for prosperity”. Readers from other backgrounds may or may not recognise their own struggles here, and their mileage will probably vary on Vilas’s fondness for cosmic-aphoristic statements like, “Nature is a vicious form of truth”, or “Honesty, too, is an ontological fraud.” He’s not wrong though, surely.
Which of us can say that we are not, as Vilas suggests, “living in the tumult of the fleetingness of everything”? What parent does not look at their children, as he does, and wish they could protect them “till the final instant of eternity”? And while the likes of Knausgaard tend to spiral inward, Vilas opens out into boundless empathy. Standing behind a sweaty, demented pensioner in the supermarket, he does his best to remember that she was once “a little girl, beside a young mother … I place the old woman in my heart, and I love her”.
There is so much love in this book, for life and for language, that it bursts the seams even in translation. If you’re remotely responsive to this, it will make a holy mess of you. In writing without illusions, Vilas must also acknowledge the limits of words on a page. “Books aren’t life, only a decoration for it, and little more than that.” Even so, this is one to clutch to your chest.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here