The Carpenter's Pencil - Softcover

Manuel Rivas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099448467 ISBN 13: 9780099448464

Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random, 2003

Synopsis

Carpenters Pencil

About this title

About the Author:

Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruna in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known in Spain for his journalism, as well as for his prize-winning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter's Pencil and Books Burn Badly. His most recent novel, All is Silence, will be published in English in 2013. His works have been translated into twenty languages.

From Publishers Weekly:

Dr. Daniel Da Barca is a Republican hero of the Spanish Civil War, an almost folkloric figure at the center of this lyrical though frequently impenetrable import. His story is related, in the spirit of Cervantes's Exemplary Tales, in a bar, by a Galician brothel keeper to a favorite whore. Da Barca's politics and philosophy stem from what his teacher, Dr. N¢voa Santos, calls "the theory of intelligent reality" that irony and lyricism are organic parts of the human condition. Even before Franco's uprising, Da Barca's movements were tracked by a soldier named Herbal a man who conceals his moral susceptibility beneath a shell of brutality. In the first days of the war, Da Barca, along with other Republican notables, is imprisoned in Santiago. One of his fellow prisoners is a painter who is taken out and killed by a group including Herbal. On the way back, Herbal, who has picked up the carpenter's pencil that the painter had been using in prison, hears a voice in his head it is the voice of the deceased, who makes Herbal into the unwilling vessel of Da Barca's salvation. Twice Da Barca is taken out to be shot, and twice he is saved by Herbal, who later arranges for the doctor's transfer from the harsh prison at Coru¤a to the less rigorous camp at Porta Coeli, from which he manages to direct a Republican resistance group. Although Rivas's (Butterfly's Tongue) highly charged language is sometimes excessive and the narrative convoluted, his instinctive balancing of Da Barca's heroism against Herbal's brutish plebian consciousness creates a work of endearing nobility that will reward the patience of what is likely to be a very small American audience.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0099448467
• ISBN 13: 9780099448464
• Binding: Paperback