The Carpenter's Pencil - Softcover

Manuel Rivas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860467431 ISBN 13: 9781860467431

Publisher: Harvill, 2001

Synopsis

In a prison in the city of Santiago de Compostela, during the early months of 1936, an artist sketches the famous porch of the cathedral that is known as the P rtico da Gloria. He uses a carpenter s pencil. Instead of reproducing the faces of the prophets and elders on the sculptured portal, he replaces them with those of his Republican prison inmates. A prison warder, who is to be the sketcher s murderer, watches in fascination. Years later the warder recounts his memories of that time to a young prostitute and tells of how the artist and his carpenter s pencil continued to influence him. This deeply poetic and moving novel explores the tragedy of the civil war that engulfed Spain and so shook the rest of the world, as well as the memories of the men and women who survived. In the process it also tells an unforgettable love story.

About this title

About the Author:

Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruna, Spain in 1957.  He writes in the Galician language of northwest Spain and is well-known in his native country for his journalism and for teh films made of his prize-winning novles and short stories.

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: Harvill
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1860467431
• ISBN 13: 9781860467431
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 166