Rosa Ribas chooses Spanish books in translation with a great sense of place

16th July 2024

Author Rosa Ribas chooses top books in Spanish literature (in translation) that convey a unique sense of place.

Spain is a country with an enormous variety of landscapes with their own personality, landscapes that mark the character of its inhabitants: we have large cities and abandoned villages, the Mediterranean light and the Cantabrian mist, the infinite plateau in the Meseta and mountainous landscapes, deserts and a green and rainy north, the islands… Places that in many literary works are so important that we also feel them as protagonists.

Of course, we have to start with one of the greatest works of universal literature, Don Quixote TR: Edith Grossman, which is inseparable from the place in which it takes place. Travelling through the plateau (la meseta) of La Mancha is an unforgettable experience. First, our eyes have to get used to the infinite sky, the distant horizon, the flat fields – green in spring, yellow in summer, brown after the cereal harvest – interrupted from time to time by a village or windmills. We then discovered its beauty and expected at any moment to come across the figure of Don Quixote and his companion Sancho Panza.

Also in the meseta, but in the north, in Castiila y León, and in our time takes place the novel Rolling Fields (Tierra de Campos) TR: Rahul Berry, by David Trueba. The infinite landscape is used by the protagonist, who travels in a funeral car to return his father’s ashes to his birthplace, to review with humor and tenderness his turbulent own life as a musician.

This is the same territory that years earlier Miguel Delibes depicted in a tough novel, Smoke on the Ground (Las ratas), in which he showed the harshness and abandonment of the Castilian countryside for years. It also shows us how this landscape has shaped the character of its inhabitants: thoughtful, sparse in words, reserved (this novel is currently out of print).

An even harsher world is found in Jesús Carrasco’s novel Out in the Open (Intemperie) TR: Margaret Jull Costa, which narrates the flight of a boy through a country punished by drought and governed by violence, where an inclement nature is always present as an antagonist.

We leave the plains and head for the Pyrenees, a majestic place, where we find high mountains, frozen lakes, exuberant nature, wild fauna, and small, picturesque villages. A place of imposing beauty that becomes threatening, full of secrets, in Agustín Martínez’s thriller, Village of the Lost Girls (Monteperdido) TR: Frank Lynne or a harsh and rough territory in the family saga written in Catalan by Maria Barbal, Stone in a Landslide (Pedra de tartera) TR: Paul Mitchell, whose protagonists end up leaving for Barcelona in search of a better life.

The protagonists of Almudena Grandes’s beautiful The Wind of the East (Los aires difíciles) TR: Sonia Soto also flee, but from the city, specifically from Madrid, to a housing development on the coast of Cádiz. They flee from their past to this place on the Atlantic coast where the winds blow from the West and the East, sometimes benevolent, sometimes stormy. An escape is also the starting point of my novel Far (Lejos) TR: Charlotte Coombe. A man who flees stumbles into a strange place, an unfinished housing development, half-inhabited and in the middle of nowhere, where he meets a woman who cannot leave this place.

The luminous Mediterranean coast can also hold stories full of darkness and mystery. In Clara Sánchez’s poetically titled novel The Scent of the Lemon Leaves (Lo que esconde tu nombre) TR: Julie Wark we feel the contrast between the shimmering, idyllic beaches of Denia in the Costa Blanca and the dark story that unfolds.

Let’s change places, let’s go North, to a very different landscape, and we will observe that the melancholy of the Galician seas and skies is transferred to the personality of Inspector Leo Caldas, the protagonist of Water-Blue Eyes (Ojos de agua azul) TR: Martin Schifino and Death on a Galician Shore (La playa de los ahogados) TR: Sonia Soto, crime novels by the Galician writer Domingo Villar.

Also in Galicia, but in inland, we find Cristina Sánchez-Andrade’s novel The Winterlings (Las inviernas) TR: Samuel Rutter a novel that smells of wet grass and rain, where the story of the two protagonist sisters can only unfold in the gloomy and atavistic universe of rural Galicia.

This is a brief sample of some of those that cover the enormous variety of Spain’s landscapes and its rich literature, in which spaces, drama and a characteristic sense of black humor often go hand in hand, even though we have not yet entered the cities.

Rosa Ribas

Far by Rosa Ribas is now published by Foundry Editions

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