The night remains for who it is.
Yellow rain It is a great book by Julio Llamazares. For me a 5 stars and even so I am aware that it is not a novel for everyone. You have to read it calmly and savor it calmly.
Do not start reading the book if you do not have the body for sadness, sadness, melancholy and to read calmly. You are warned.
The prose of Llamazares is magnificent. While I was reading I remember thinking that I could never write like this in my life. There are many books that seem easy to write, although at the moment they are not. This neither is nor appears to be.
Argument
Yellow rain it narrates the abandonment of a town in the Aragonese Pyrenees by its inhabitants, until only one remains, Andrés. With the memories of Andrés we will live as he has been uninhabited and different adventures from the past that will make us understand the current situation and accompany him in all his solitude.
It is a sad book, very sad, it has become a symbol of the rural exodus, of empty Spain, but I see it as a book about loneliness. The loneliness that poisons and kills. It has earned the number 2 spot on my sad book ranking which continues to top Grave of the Fireflies scored by Akiyuki Nosaka.
The atmosphere created in the novel oppresses your heart, disarms you, and fills you with regret. Because it is not a loneliness as we find for example in Light a bonfire by Jack London, which is lonely in nature. This is a loneliness that hurts.
If you dare, it is a very cheap novel that can be obtained for less than € 6.
Scraps
I am surprised as I have already said his style, which is like a poetic prose, like reading really beautiful poetry and complex at the same time.
For example.
From that night on, rust was my only memory and the only landscape of my life. For five or six weeks, the leaves of the poplars erased the roads and blinded the prey and entered my soul as in the empty rooms of the houses. Then the Sabina thing happened. And, as if the town itself were a simple creation of my gaze, rust and oblivion fell on it with all its power and all its cruelty. Everyone, even my wife, had abandoned me, Ainielle was dying without my being able to even try to avoid it and, in the middle of being silenced, like two strange shadows, the dog and I kept looking at each other, despite knowing that neither of us had the answer we were looking for.
There are passages with more, strength, that impress, that put the pain inside you, but as it would reveal important parts of the plot I am not going to put them.
I searched in vain for her around the house: in the downstairs rooms and the kitchen, in the tool storage room, in the kitchen and attic, in the cellar. In the portal, I did not find the dog either. Only the dark leftover of the wild boar still hung from the beam, feeding with its blood the pool that broke beneath it the perfect whiteness of the snow.
I leave some of the images that I have tried and that I have not chosen as a cover. In the end I have chosen The one that appears man, with the clock as the passage of time and all wrapped in a yellow light, like that yellow rain.
How time works
I rescue this fragment where he tells us about the passage of time and that I think is magnificent.
Time always flows as the river flows: melancholic and equivocal at first, rushing itself as the years go by. Like the river, it becomes entangled between the tender eggs and the moss of childhood. Like him, he falls down the gorges and jumps that mark the beginning of his acceleration. Until the age of twenty or thirty, one believes that time is an infinite river, a strange substance that feeds on itself and is never consumed. But there comes a time when man discovers the betrayal of the years. There always comes a moment - mine coincided with the death of my mother - in which, suddenly, youth ends and time melts like a pile of snow struck by lightning. From that moment, the days and years begin to shorten and time becomes an ephemeral vapor - just like the one that melts snow - that little by little envelops the heart, lulling it to sleep. And so when we want to realize it, it is too late to even try to rebel.
Ainielle exists
Although the plot and characters are made up, the town of Ainielle in which the novel is set really exists.
In 1970, it was completely abandoned, but its houses still resist, rotting in silence, in the middle of oblivion and snow, in the mountains of the Pyrenees of Huesca that they call Sobrepuerto.
For its part, the book Ainielle, the yellow memory, by Enrique Satué, tells the true story of Ainielle.
- Link where can we see any photo of Ainielle
