Portugal Books

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This is a first-rate biography that is an excellent follow-on to Stroud's book about Napoleon's nephew, Charles-Lucien Bonaparte (The Emperor of Nature). Stroud has been a biographer of natural historians (another was of Thomas Say, the first American naturalist), but this sojourn into the American exile of Napoleon's older brother Joseph, an aristocrat and former king of Naples and Spain, proves a good fit for her.

One suspects Stroud was drawn to Joseph's story in part because he made his large estate in southern New Jersey into a vast private nature reserve, in which he enriched the natural stock by introducing species from his much-missed Europe, including hares and Osage orange trees. Stroud throws in amusing
anecdotes about encounters with wildlife: Charles-Lucien, newly arrived from Italy, once gleefully leaps off his horse to grab a beautiful black-and-white creature scurrying along the ground -- only to get sprayed by a skunk.

But Stroud doesn't dwell on the natural history but rather on the rich aristocratic life of Joseph in America, who built one of the country's finest art collections at the time. Stroud makes it clear that the degree to which Joseph influenced the advancement of high European culture in this country, which today reveals itself in great private and public art and library collections, magnificent gardens, and grand estates, was significant. His library, for one, had more volumes than the Library of Congress.

Joseph, a sensitive sophisticate who seems to be the polar opposite of his willful, deeply egotistical younger brother, comes across as a highly likable fellow who is at once an expatriate playboy and a partisan utterly committed to restoring a Bonaparte to the throne of France. His exile in America, which lasts 17 years, makes for a good story, and Stroud tells it with verve, intelligence, and an easygoing yet authoritative style that should appeal to both lay and scholarly readers. I particularly enjoyed her sense of humor: there's one scene of Joseph confronting Napoleon in the bathtub about the Louisiana Purchase that should not be missed.

(4.5 stars) The Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939) and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco form the underpinning of this hypnotic novel, which is simultaneously a love story, a story about political and personal aspirations, and a story about writing and the creative process. In a narrative that swirls through time and place, often turning in upon itself and revisiting earlier events from different points of view, life during the tumultuous Civil War unfolds and is carried forward for more than thirty years of Franco's harsh dictatorship.

When the book opens in 1969, Minaya, a university student, has just been released from detention for his part in a student demonstration. Seeking refuge in Magina, where his elderly uncle lives, Minaya intends to search for the missing masterwork of a little known poet named Jacinto Solana and to write his doctoral thesis on Solana in the seclusion of the countryside. His uncle Manuel and Solana were childhood friends, and both had been in love with the same woman, Mariana Rios, an artist's model.

As the story flashes back to 1936 - 37, the complex relationship of Manuel, Solana, and Mariana unfolds. Mariana, we learn at the beginning of the novel, was shot to death, supposedly by a stray bullet fired through the window on her wedding night, during the earliest days of the Spanish Civil War. Manuel never recovered, closing their nuptial bedroom and living as a recluse. Solana, a Communist, endured ten years of political detention and torture before returning to Manuel's house in Magina. When Minaya arrives to stay with his uncle, Solana is already dead, according to his friends, shot by government troops, his papers burned, and his masterpiece, Beatus Ille, missing. With the help of Inez, who works for his uncle, Minaya searches for the manuscript, determined to restore this poet to the place he deserves as a revolutionary Spanish writer.

The intense, kaleidoscopic narrative, filled with lyrical and sensual descriptions, gradually reveals the whole story of Manuel and Mariana, at the same time that it also details the much later death of Solana. Details of the civil war, its tumult, and its aftermath broaden as the communists, anarchists, and supporters of the status quo contend for the future of Spain. As the narrative swirls, multiple points of view add depth and intensity to the narrative. The style is hypnotic, catching up the reader in the mood and weaving a spell, despite the fact that this unusual novel moves obliquely and lacks the usual beginning, middle, and end. It is not unusual for some sentences to be one hundred fifty words long and for paragraphs to go on for pages, yet the narrative speeds along on the strength of its spell and the intensity of its mood. A novel that will appeal to readers willing to succumb to its mood and not worry about its complex style and swirling chronology, A Manuscript of Ashes is an intriguing early novel by an author who is one of Spain's most honored contemporary authors. n Mary Whipple

Sepharad
In Her Absence
The Gaze on the Past: Popular Culture and History in Antonio Munoz Molina's Novels

This book is about a walk from south Portugal to Italy. As the writer is on a very modest budget he usually sleeps rough, but gets lots of hospitality on the way. This leads to all kinds of stories, mainly from old people and people who live a lonely life in the mountains.

He does not make his goal of Istanbul, but it is a very remarkable journy anyway, comparable to Patrick's Leigh Fermor's walk from Hook of Holland to Constantinople but without the luxury part in the latter book.

The book is very well written and keeps you reading mile after mile (page after page). I have quite a collection of walking stories, this was one of the first and I still rate it as one of the best.

For poetry lovers and especially for those interested in cantigas de amigo, this book is a must for your collection. It contains original texts, beautiful translations, and a well written introduction.

I found this book quite by luck, hoping the title would truly indicate its contents. I have been wanting to plan a trip of travel across the Mediterranean from port to port, and this book is a splendid start for such a venture. Also, it is sufficiently rigorous and detailed-- probably because the author is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.

This book is not a history, but rather an account of a process of history. Professor Aguilar Fernández writes here about the way in which the collective mentality of a society comes to adjust to the complexities of the memory of a very violent and traumatic history. Possibly this might be the most imporatnt book in all of the literature of contemporary history in relation to the processes of memory and social forgetting.

This book gives you a detailed guide to all the major roads of Spain and Portugal. If you are planning to drive in Spain or Portugal, it's a great help. The spiral binding makes it easy to fold -- much better than a large paper map. The only disadvantage is that it is heavier than a paper map.

I've only visited Madrid, so I'll forcus my comments on that part of the book. The explanations are short and to the point but manage to cover up all the major sight seeing. The restaurant recoomendations are especially good, and in a country where you don't speak the language, and they don't speak yours, it's nice to find a place that has authentic local food on one hand and an English menu on the other hand...

I teach Spanish, and I actually have this map laminated and posted in my room for use while I teach and for students to use while planning trips. The Michelin maps are produced by the same folks that publish the Guide Michelin, travel guides that were a mainstay for travel in Europe for years. The map quality is very good, and it is highly detailed. It has a very large national map on one side with detailed smaller maps opposite. Normally, a map this size would be unwieldy, but it is printed on thin but tough paper. I used a similar map while traveling in Germany, and I simply folded it so the area I was in was visible, while the rest of the map folded down flat and easily tucked in the novel I was reading on the train, etc.