Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present - Softcover

Settle, Mary Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393327175 ISBN 13: 9780393327175

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

"Settle takes us along as she digs into Spain's past....Consistently compelling."―Wayne Hoffman, Washington Post Book World

At eighty-two years old, Mary Lee Settle set off alone to find the Spain she thought she knew. But, like Columbus on another voyage of discovery, she found something―many things―that she hadn't even known she was looking for. Winner of a National Book Award for fiction and author of an acclaimed book of travel and history on Turkey, Settle brings to her task the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. She follows the great, traumatic flows in Spanish history: the Moorish conquest from south to north, and the Christian reconquista several hundred years later in the opposite direction. Those epic struggles, shaped by geography, are the source of the fascinating tensions in the Spanish character, in its art, architecture, and literature, and the author's magical prose puts these gifts in our hands.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Lee Settle won the National Book Award for her novel Blood Ties and was the founder of the PEN/Faulkner Prize. She died in 2005.

From Publishers Weekly

Traveling through Spain's central provinces from Castile to the southern coast in a "beautiful small rental car, a Real; stick shift, balance and weight perfect for speeding," novelist Settle (The Beulah Quintet; Blood Ties) makes a point of this being a solo trek ("To be alone by choice is one of the great luxuries of the world"). With this engaging, lucid recollection, personal, but not self-centered, she's the perfect guide for a vicarious journey through a land where "history intrudes everywhere." Footprints of Visigoths, Romans, Moors, Muslims and Falangists appear all along the path; Cervantes looms large. Settle encounters El Cid in Zamora, Unamuno in Salamanca and Lorca and St. John of the Cross in Granada. St. Teresa, who "wasn't afraid of God, the king, the papal nuncio who tried to stop her, or the devil himself," emerges in Avila, and in Tordesillas, Settle finds the queen whom history refers to as Juana la Loca de Amor, but whom Settle sees as "the victim of a hostile takeover." She sights the explorers (Cortes, Pizarro, de Soto, Balboa) in their Extremadura hometowns and recounts the Knights Templar's tale in Jerez de los Cabelleros. Settle, an "eighty-two-year-old grownup," delights in discovery, is curious about the old, possessing an intellectual-quest spirit and ageless wisdom. Clearly in love with the "people so beautiful," "the scene so handsome," Settle invites readers to follow in her footsteps and see out of her eyes. Map, 12 pages of illus. not seen by PW.
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393327175
• ISBN 13: 9780393327175
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360