Death is old-fashioned, declares the writer of this sly Spanish autofiction about family and grief
We’re born, we grow, we accumulate what we can of the world – knowledge, skills, pleasures, food, time, money, affection, disaffection – and then depart. It’s a system. But when it means the disappearance of people you love, it can seem an awfully wasteful one. In his autobiographical novel Ordesa, the Spanish writer Manuel Vilas balks at letting his dead parents go. Death is old-fashioned, he declares.
And so begins an intentionally faltering and onanistic research project, as the narrator meanders through the foggy past in an attempt to bring his parents back into focus. The process of dredging up nuggets of personality and experience from the mud fascinates him – perhaps a little too much. Near the end, he declares he’s falling in love with his own life. The reader is left feeling a bit of a gooseberry.