San, the book of Miracles, by Manuel Astur.
Acantilado Press, 2020

Excerpt published in Trafika Europe 19 - Iberian Adventure
Trafika Europe website
Full overview available

For rights, contact: Txell Torrent, txell@mbagencialiteraria.es (permissions no longer avilable)

This book begins with a fratricide in rural Asturias, northern Spain, where the characters’ tragic personal lives form a compelling contrast with the painful beauty of the physical environment in which they live. After unintentionally killing his brother when an argument about inheritance of the family farm comes to blows, Marcelino is forced to flee his hometown, the fictional San Antolin, and the farm that he loves. In doing so, Marcelin leaves the Old World behind and enters the New World, unable to return.

Astur’s character’s world is far from a pastoral paradise and their painful lives are punctuated by acts of violence and cruelty. The tension between the gorgeously evocative prose and the moral and material poverty it describes creates a stark yet irresistible contrast. The simple plot creates a space for Astur’s language to breathe and blossom, and he riffs on his subject matter in a prose rich with imagery, music and metaphor, yet in a way that never seems superfluous or gratuitous. His muse is the Asturian landscape, the people who dwell within it, their nightmares and their fears.

“San, the Book of Miracles” offers a new synthesis of the old, pushing literary forms forward while still retaining a recognizable continuity with the old. Specifically, Astur incorporates grotesque gothic elements and the seamless coexistence of the fantastic and the mundane which characterizes magical realist writing, renewing literary forms by relocating them to fresh environments and contexts in an agile authorial voice entirely his own.

“We are the first words. We are the ones who went and the ones who just arrived. We are the feast and the day’s work and we are boredom. We are the one who burns you and we are the one who puts you out. We are the one who wakes you up in the morning and we are the one who hurls you into bed when night comes. We are, of course, also the one who keeps you awake at night. We are the Enemy and the only comfort. Almost nothing.
A fistful of words, the final words.                                                     

We were about to fall silent. First, we put it off for a while. After a while, we postponed it until later. But the time never came. Finally, we said to ourselves: no, this moment is the moment because it is all time. We have the voice and we have the time.    
We have all of time.

Just as a stone that has sat under the sun all day still radiates heat long after night has fallen, there is a moment in the peaceful summer sunsets when one would say that objects are glowing, as if they were giving back some of the generous light they received during the day. It was then that Marcelino would put down what he was doing -the hoe with a lump of earth, the shovel on the hay, the scythe fresh with fragrant green blood- he would straighten up, run his hand over his forehead, and gaze out over the valley at his feet. Everything glowed and echoed like a bell of golden light. He let his eyes fill with sky.That July sunset, too, Marcelino stopped and reflected. The house, the granary, the cart with its shaft towards the sky, the dry straw, the ears of corn, the backs of the cattle returning home along the path, the dog's bowl, the rusty drum among the nettles, the axe in the stump, the wood chips and broken trunks, the sawdust on the ground, even the moss that embraced the stones of the wall which bound the small orchard, even the trees of the nearby forest and the mountain peaks: everything shimmered against the deep blue sky where the first star began announcing the new era. Everything except the great bloodstain on the sawdust and the body of his brother, so dark that they actually seemed to catch the light, as if they were the source of the black ink that gradually filled the valley, filled the sky, and drew the bats that began to dance around the yellowish light of the solitary copper lamp post.”