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Revision as of 13:35, 10 August 2020
, 13:35, 10 August 2020no edit summary
|reviewer=Robert James
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Spanish Civil War epic is hard to get into and the characters blend together at times; however , you can’t doubt the beauty of Rivas’ exceptional writing for a second.
|rating=4
|buy=Maybe
}}
I normally start with a brief summary of the novel I’m reviewing, but Rivas’ sprawling epic is close to impossible to do anything ‘brief’ with. While it starts in 1881, it’s the book -burning witnessed by Hercules the boxer during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 which gives this novel its title and it floats through several other eras, eventually finishing more than a century after it started. Along the way, we meet a young washerwoman who sees souls in the river, Olinda the matchgirl, Gabriel the stammerer, and the Judge of Oklahoma, star of a series of Western novels Gabriel’s father reads.
If you’re valuing a novel by the amount of time it takes to read, Rivas’ five hundred plus densely packed pages come in very close to the top of the class here. Of course, most of us would pick quality over quantity when it comes to prose. Looking at that quality, in many ways this is still a book to be savoured, with some breathtaking writing at times – full marks to Jonathan Dunne for doing such a great job of translating from the Galician. That said, it’s overwhelming at times because of the length and the sheer number of characters,
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.
Further reading suggestion: For another epic spanning a century or so, I absolutely adored [[We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen]] and would highlyrecommend it to everyone. You might also enjoy [[All Is Silence by Manuel Rivas]].
{{amazontext|amazon=0099520338}}
