In the Last Blue - Hardcover

Carme Riera

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585678538 ISBN 13: 9781585678532

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2007

Synopsis

During the Spanish Inquisition on the island of Majorca, a small enclave of local Jews--all of whom have been baptized as Christians--determine to escape detention in the Inquisition by escaping to lands of freedom across the Atlantic. But weather frustrates their flight, and eventually thirty-seven of them were captured and condemned to burn at the stake in the Auto-de-Fe. In prose at once lyrical and suspenseful, Riera recreates the lives of Majorcan Jews in the seventeenth century--in a world of inquisitors, aristocrats, merchants, farmers, and soldiers--in a lush mosaic of history and period detail, religion and cultural lore. Already acclaimed around the world, In the Last Blue is at once a beautiful, poetic, riveting, and devastating tale of hope and fear.

About this title

About the Author

Carme Riera was born in Palma, Mallorca, in 1948 and is a professor of Spanish literature at Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Prudenci Bertrana, the Ramon Llull Prize, and, for In the Last Blue, the Josep Pla Prize, the Joan Crexells Prize, the Lletra dí Or Prize, the Ministry of Culture National Prize for Narrative, and the Elio Vittorini Prize from the Syracuse Department of Tourism. In the year 2000, the Government of Catalonia awarded Riera the Saint George Cross.

Reviews

This novel of the Spanish Inquisition was an acclaimed contribution to Catalan letters on its 1994 release. In an act of madness that he says was commanded him by an angel, Majorcan religious Jew Rafel Cortes tries to circumcise his adult male converso relatives. In the midst of this rampage, he catches his daughter Aina having sex with the Christian Juli Ramis and attacks him, too. His cousin, a silversmith also named Rafel Cortes, is a widower converso with a deep admiration of Catholic ritual; he's also an informer prized by the local clergy. The Jewish Rafel's extreme, irrational violence is meant to foreshadow the irrationality that sends 37 members of the Majorcan Jewish community (including the Jewish Rafel) to the stake after they're captured in a botched emigration attempt. The internecine Church and Jewish community politics leading up to that horror are treated with equal contempt by Riera, who notes in an afterword that the novel "does not aim to finger old wounds or open new ones." The awkward translation doesn't help in interpreting the book's graphic shock tactics and pulpy tonal shifts (the sex is as graphic as the violence), so it's hard to determine what Riera's aims actually are. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1585678538
• ISBN 13: 9781585678532
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384