In my desperate search for something to read over the last couple of months, I decided to read this widely acclaimed novel. Winner of all sorts of awards and, for me, very much in the mould of A Little Life - something so bad that it made me question the sanity of thousands of supposed intellectuals around the world.
While I do understand that ETA caused a lot of problems to people in the Basque countries and all over Spain, the vision of the book feels excessively Manichean. Miren feels little more than a caricature from a 1950s B-movie. And while on critic wrote that this is War and Peace for our times, I think it's more like a very low calibre feuilleton (then again, I have never actually read War and Peace!).
I unfortunately read this in translation, and the translator did a monumentally pathetic job: some Spanish expression were translated literally, others more freely, the verbal tenses (already confusing in the original, I've been informed) were all over the place, and the whole prose was so incredibly stilted.
No comments:
Post a Comment