The Carpenter's Pencil - Softcover

Manuel Rivas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860469299 ISBN 13: 9781860469299

Publisher: Harvill Press, 2001

Synopsis

I did a lot of bad things, but when I was before the painter I murmured to myself that I was sorry, that I wished I didn't have to, and I don't know what he thought when our eyes met, a moist blaze in the night, but I want to believe he understood, he saw that I was doing it to save him torment. Without further ado, without moving from where I was, I put the pistol to his temple and blew off his head. And then I remembered the pencil. The pencil he carried behind his ear. This pencil...."

Manuel Rivas has been heralded as one of the brightest in a new wave of Spanish writers less influenced by magic realism and more by Spanish and European traditions, as well as the unique history of Spain over the past seventy years. The Carpenter's Pencil was a bestseller in Spain and has been published in nine countries.

Set in the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, The Carpenter's Pencil charts the linked destinies of Dr. Daniel Da Barca, the Republican who, like his Biblical namesake, cheats death in Franco's prisons, and Herbal, the illiterate Falangist and Da Barca's shadow and tail, and of the unnamed painter with the carpenter's pencil ("He does the posters, he's the one who paints the ideas."), the man who unites them in life and death. And of Marisa Mallo, loved by both Da Barca and Herbal; Pepe Sanchez, the bolero singer; "Genghis Khan," the wrestler; Dombod‡n the Kid, the innocent; Mother Izarne, the nun; and the legend of the estrangement of the two sisters, Life and Death. All are bound by the events of the Civil War-the artists and the peasants alike-and all are rendered, in Rivas's skillful hand, with the power of the carpenter's pencil, a pencil that draws both the measured line and the artist's fanciful vision.

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 Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1860469299
• ISBN 13: 9781860469299
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192