I knew the work of Julio Llamazares because of the fact that he had written a book about an Aragonese people in extinction. That novel The Yellow Rain sounded a lot at the time and was read a lot among the young students of my institute.
The most curious thing of all was the magical coincidence, the geographical excuse that led all those students, through the decadent and lonely streets of Ainielle, to other towns also uninhabited in those days, our own consciences in their most existential aspect.
So, in a way, both my reading friends at the time and I are indebted to that novel and by extension to the author. A toast to that yellow rain of an easy eschatological metaphor (that is how it seemed at the time to the adolescents who were) and with a much deeper background than what we initially foresaw.
I tracked down the author in other new novels, alternated with travel books or essays. And from those readings, these evaluations ...
3 recommended novels by Julio Llamazares
Yellow rain
You guessed it, right? When a reading is enjoyable at an early age, it is hardly forgotten. Because in some way it teaches you to see the world, or at least it gives you a more complex look.
Behind that last inhabitant of Ainielle a camera moves that follows his steps and his chores, which sometimes deviates the focus towards the existence of the small, of the far away from civilization, of the detail overlooked in a place where it hardly passes nothing, of the echo that a tree makes when it falls into an empty forest.
Summary: The yellow rain is the monologue of the last inhabitant of an abandoned town in the Aragonese Pyrenees. Between "the yellow rain" of the autumn leaves that is equated with the flow of time and memory, or in the hallucinatory whiteness of the snow, the voice of the narrator, at the doors of death, evokes us other disappeared inhabitants of the town, who abandoned it or died, and it confronts us with the wanderings of its mind and the discontinuities of its perception in the phantom village over which loneliness has ruled.
In the town of Ainielle, only Andrés and Sabina remain. Little by little the marriage has been forced to see how the other inhabitants, spurred on by misery or by the promise of a better world, have gradually abandoned the harsh living conditions. One night, however, Andrés discovers Sabina hanged in the mill.
Now there is no one left who can carry with him the unbearable weight of the past. The yellow rain confirms in Llamazares the live, precise and genuine lexicon, the artistic authenticity and the skills of creating a poetic climate and a personal universe that credit him to one of our most valuable storytellers.
The tears of Saint Lawrence
The anchor of the past justifies all our future moves. The way in which we learn to love or overcome adversity is forging the ultimate personality of our temperament. Life as a poem written from longing that cries out for hope.
Summary: An exciting story about the passage of time and memory. A story about lost paradises and hells - parents and children, lovers and friends, encounters and farewells - that travel a lifetime between the fleetingness of time and the anchors of memory.
As he did in The Yellow Rain with celebrated mastery, Llamazares once again uses a precise and powerful language to draw a poetic atmosphere through which the narrator's voice evokes and recounts the details of an existence lived with reflection and emotion to a weather.
Different ways of looking at the water
By now you will understand that what Julio Llamazares is about is breaking down experiences, perspectives. A kind of Heraclitus who has assumed that we never bathe in the same river or look at crystal clear water in the same way.
The most curious thing about this book is the search for different perspectives within a family saga. The heavens or hells of one or the other even belonging to the same clan and having adopted the same beliefs and values ​​...
Summary: Around the ashes of the grandfather, which will rest forever under the water, sixteen people reconstruct the history of their family as well as their own.
From the grandmother to the youngest granddaughter, from the memory of the village in which the elders were born and raised before being forced to abandon it in the face of its imminent destruction to the stories and feelings of the youngest, the story runs like a flow successive consciousness, like an existential and polyhedral kaleidoscope to which the surface of the water serves as a mirror.
Different ways of looking at water is a novel about exile, about the passage of time and memory, about the feeling of attachment to nature, about the imprint that the rural and natural environment leaves in the hearts of those who once did. they inhabited.
Other recommended books by Julio Llamazares
Firefly
There is no greater suspense than life itself, the series of guilt and secrets that make up this rosary of experiences towards an impossible salvation of the soul. As Yupanqui and then Bunbury sang, it is precisely the soul that writes the books that no one reads. Here we find a testimony of those that surrounds existence between mists towards the greatest enigmas...
"Behind each lighted window there is a soul similar to our soul, a shipwrecked dream and a survivor of the day that is ending or that is about to begin who is waiting for someone to speak to him in order to respond." A writer receives the news of the death of the one who was his teacher as a journalist and with whom, despite hardly seeing each other anymore, he maintained an unbreakable friendship. After the funeral, someone anonymously sends him a copy of a novel that the deceased published when he was young, a book that was banned by censorship and that everyone believed had disappeared. This fact, along with a series of subsequent revelations, will take the protagonist back to the city where he began his career as a journalist to try to decipher the mystery that hangs over the figure of his teacher and friend.
Firefly It is a suspense novel that talks about that secret life that we all have, but also a reflection on the passion to write, which overcomes everything. A tribute, in short, to all those people who, from their imagination, like fireflies at night, create lives while the rest of us sleep.
