Cremation

by Rafael Chirbes, Valerie Miles (Translator)

Overview

An overflowing, mesmeric masterpiece about greed from “one of the most remarkable authors on the Spanish scene” (The Guardian)

Along the Mediterranean coastline of Spain, real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into tourist resorts, nightclubs, and beachfront properties with lavish bars and pools. The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs. Cremation opens with the death of Matías, a paterfamilias who had rejected all of these changes and whose passing sets off a chain reaction, uncovering a past that had been buried for years, and leading those closest to him to question the paths they’ve chosen.
      In a rich mosaic narrative, filled with a hypnotic chorus of voices, Cremation explores the coked-up champagne fizz of luxurious parties shadowed by underworlds of political corruption, prostitution, and ruthless financial speculation. The novel enters that melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash and captures something essential about our values, our choices, and our all too human mistakes. Like William Faulkner or Francis Bacon, Chirbes stares, clear-eyed, into the abyss, and portrays us as we really are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811224314
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	685 KB

About the Author

Rafael Chirbes (1949-2015) wrote ten novels and received the National Prize for Literature and the Critics Prize for On the Edge. ABC named him “the best writer of the twenty-first century in Spain."
Valerie Miles, an editor, writer, translator, and professor, is the cofounding editor of the literary journal Granta in Spanish.

Editorial Reviews

09/27/2021

From the late Spanish writer Chirbes (On the Edge) comes a stream-of-consciousness account of a family reckoning with its relationships—both ironclad and frayed—in the wake of a beloved uncle’s death. In Misent, a fictional Spanish coastal city, unscrupulous developer Rubén Bertomeu grapples with memories of his late brother, Matias, a former anti-Franco revolutionary philosopher turned small-time farmer. The brothers could not have been more different: Ruben has transformed the once-idyllic city into a wealthy resort town overrun by condominiums. Many of Ruben’s own family members, including Matias and Ruben’s only daughter, Silvia, take umbrage with the machinations of his exploitation of small landowners, cutting backdoor deals with municipal authorities, and surreptitiously transporting drugs into the area. Spinning the story out from multiple perspectives, including Ruben’s 29-year-old second wife; one of Matias’s close confidants; and a former underling of Ruben’s, Chirbes imbues the characters with passion and intellect. There’s no conventional plot, but what emerges is a strong sense of late 20th-century Spanish culture and politics, especially through Ruben: “I’m the sole proprietor of these memories... I preserve it.” It adds up to a fascinating look at human interactions. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Utterly convincing in its psychological details, but also memorable for the beauty of its writing and rhythms."

Colm Tóibín

"The works of the late Spanish novelist Rafael Chirbes offer a rebuke to what we might call lifestyle literature. Two of his final novels, Cremation and On the Edge, both published in translation by New Directions, reclaim a decayed form of modernism to castigate the late aughts’ feast of mammon."

The Baffler - Dustin Illingworth

"Rafael Chirbes is a master of the kind of Spanish literature that shines most brightly in lyrical descriptive passages and powerful metaphors."

The New York Times - Mara Faye Lethem

"Chirbes' novel is a quite powerful book of testimonies and experiences, an indictment of post-Franco Spain that has barreled more or less blindly ahead, damn to many of the consequences."

Complete Review

"One of the most remarkable authors on the Spanish scene."

The Guardian

★ 2021-08-18
A man’s death stirs thoughts among his family and friends, who are also connected by their experience of Spain’s economic surge through the early aughts.

This is the second novel by Chirbes, one of Spain’s leading writers, to be translated into English. The first, On the Edge (2016), concerned the country’s economic decline after the global recession took hold in 2008. This book, originally published in 2007, gives a view of the pre-collapse bubble as property developer Rubén Bertomeu and others ponder the death of his younger brother, Matías. Hold on to that simple precis, because Chirbes (1949-2015) isn’t an easy read. The book’s 13 main sections are each a single paragraph offering a kind of stream of consciousness, with a different character dominating each chapter. Rubén’s enforcer—for drugs and violence played a role in the developer’s success story—takes one of the leading voices and provides some dark humor. Rubén is a man whose early idealism as an architect faded, and he grew wealthy feeding Spain’s post-Franco building boom. He fell out with his friend Brouard, a novelist who long withheld from Rubén an important plot of land he owned. Brouard’s chapters show an aged, ailing heavy drinker, the subject of a biography being written by Juan, husband of Rubén’s daughter, Silvia. She’s an art restorer who has used her father's money but abhors his greed and ego. Chirbes has a larger economic theme, but he’s also concerned with the way money affects family and friendship. His prose can be dense and disorienting but it’s always intelligent, and the translation by Miles seems excellent. While the main voices are generally distinctive, they all offer the author a convenient surrogate for brief rants and lectures on everything from art to literature, sex, money, aging, flowers, marriage, politics, history, and much more.

A challenging excursion from one of Europe’s most distinctive voices.

Kirkus Reviews