Late into The Last Days of Terranova, Vicenzo Fontana, owner of the Terranova Bookstore, recollects his father revealing to him the key to Homer’s man of twists and turns. It’s a familiar conversation, one echoing in the book’s plot and the reader’s own experience. James Joyce obsessed over the key to the Odyssey, as did Malcolm Lowry, as does Daniel Mendelsohn — from Odysseus to Telemachus to father to son to father to son, as it was and ever shall be, world without end. Nonetheless, Vicenzo’s father adds another layer. “The entire plot of the Odyssey,” he says, “can be boiled down to a series of subplots that act as devices to rob Odysseus of his memory.”
It’s within Vicenzo’s wash of memories, of his father and uncle and their troubled bookstore, that The Last Days of Terranova, the fifteenth novel by Manuel Rivas, takes place. The story begins in the fall of 2014, when Vicenzo puts a sign in the window of the bookstore announcing the “[t]otal liquidation of all inventory due to imminent closure.” His choice of the verb liquidation isn’t accidental. To Vicenzo, the closing of the family bookstore is like a killing, of himself, of his family, of the precious books within, and of the memories intertwined with all of them. It’s also connected, due to its location in Galicia during the reign of Franco and its continuity after his death in 1975, to their collective struggle and oppression under fascism. The forced closure of the bookstore, because of the avarice of real estate speculators, is something to fight against with all the language, memories, and thoughts that Vicenzo has.
Manuel Rivas’s work includes journalism, essays, and nine collections of poetry, in addition to his novels. One of these novels, The Carpenter’s Pencil, inspired a film and became the most widely translated work in the history of Galician literature. Galicia, a self-governing community in northwest Spain, underwent decades of oppression at the hands of Franco before becoming autonomous, and Rivas’s work revels at last in its unique experiences, language (The Last Days of Terranova boasts on its cover, “Translated from the Galician”) and culture. Such a project suits Rivas’s skillset. As a writer, he first came alive “in a place of listening, which was a staircase in my maternal grandparents’ house,” and his work reflects this origin. He renders memory’s vivid, unfakeable particularities in surreal phrases and images to connect the divergent threads of The Last Days of Terranova into a unified whole.
“My mind wanders sometimes,” Vicenzo confesses early on in the novel. His wanderings — his childhood hospital stay inside an iron lung due to polio, his 20s spent collecting Bowie records and falling in love in Madrid — provide the book its structure, slipping always between eras. After Vicenzo puts the apocalyptic sign up in his bookstore, he goes to stare in misery out at the sea. There, lost in reminiscence, he sees a young couple, his “company at the edge of earth,” the “[s]taggeringly pregnant” Viana and her motorcyclist boyfriend, Crash, out prying barnacles off the rocks. When Viana notices Vicenzo’s wandering mind, she tells him, “You need to get that checked out.”
Vicenzo’s father, Amaro Fontana, possesses a similar mind. Because of his fascination with Homer’s Odyssey, Amaro goes by Polytropos, Odysseus’s first given epithet in the text, meaning “much-wandering.” A reader and a raconteur “infatuated with the act of speech,” Amaro opens the bookstore when Vicenzo is a boy, buttonholing his customers for recommendations and literary debates. Like his Greek namesake, Amaro is distant from his son’s life thereafter, not because of his physical wanderings but because he’s busy with his own musings, work, and writings. Amaro writes poems, articles about the Odyssey, and his secret memoir, titled Mnemosyne in Hispania. In addition, through Terranova and his other, more clandestine associates, he becomes “the biggest banned book provider in all of Galicia.” Amaro works not only to preserve his store but also to subvert Franco’s regime and its restrictions, working with exiles and smugglers, with “false backs [to] their suitcases” to promote the works of “anti-Franco publishing houses.”
One of these smugglers is Vicenzo’s Uncle Eliseo, the book’s most mercurial and compelling character, forever “ambling around with his subconscious on his sleeve.” A heady and zany storyteller, Eliseo adds tales of his physical wanderings to Amaro’s mental ones. While Amaro tends the store, Eliseo’s “off gallivanting through Europe and America” and being “invited by the Surrealist International,” sending back the suitcases of books. Unlike Amaro, however, Eliseo finds time to visit young Vicenzo in his iron lung, telling him “about the heroic little rabbit that ate his collard-green-mother, or the story of Job,” or even how Vicenzo’s father once ran afoul of the Franco regime and “had been erased from a group photo in the newspaper.” Eliseo’s charm is the book’s most potent one, that of layering narrative upon narrative, stacked as high as the Terranova shelves.
Beneath their literary aspirations, the family cracks and crumbles. While he’s smuggling books and subverting fascism, Amaro rarely comes to visit Vicenzo in the hospital and struggles to show him affection. “The Man Erased,” Vicenzo dubs him, eventually admitting that “at some point I stopped taking a sympathetic view of my father.” Comba, Vicenzo’s mother, has the opposite problem of Amaro: she’s present but not lucid. Her memories subsume her, and she begins to believe she’s still a girl sewing clothes with her mother, “in the springtime of her life.”
Eliseo likewise lives in his stories more than he does in reality. When Vicenzo later introduces Eliseo to Garúa, his love interest, he explains that the stories Eliseo tells aren’t real. “Everything he says is true,” Vicenzo tells Garúa. “He just wasn’t there for any of it.” Eliseo hasn’t been gone so often because he’s been traveling the world on behalf of the Surrealist International. He’s been in mental institutions, “caught up in the nets of the police several times for being gay.” The stories provide cover, an escape, a way to rescue himself in the eyes of his nephew.
And Vicenzo, on top of all of it, years later, “can’t escape the feeling that the die is cast.” He’s cursed as his family has been through the years. Garúa strays from him, and his landlords drive him out, and he begins to become a different kind of Man Erased. Like his father, he turns to writing but produces little of consequence. People on the street recognize him for the lyrics he wrote for the Urchins, “a band that carved out a place for itself in the metal scene until people realized that we weren’t metal.” A police officer confesses to him, “I have a copy of all the complaints you’ve filed.”
The arc Rivas’s novel describes begins to feel familiar. Although it’s set in an underwritten location and told in a compelling voice, one can’t shake the awareness that Rivas is telling a timeworn story about an intergenerational family business under threat from moneyed interests. It’s a Hollywood storyline the reader’s absorbed many times before. The flashbacks, the inherited trauma, the charming old shopkeeper, and the coincidence that materializes at the final moment to forestall such a closure — these wouldn’t be out of place in You’ve Got Mail or a Hallmark movie. Or where else have we seen it? Somewhere else, surely. Many such somewheres.
What distinguishes Rivas’s approach isn’t that he reroutes the generic storyline much but that he festoons it with winsome, slithery sentences and references born from Rivas’s own literary wanderings. It’s here that the novel focuses its most genuine invention. The movement always on Eliseo’s mind is surrealism (besides his trips to the Surrealist International, he reads André Breton and calls even Jesus Himself “an abject surrealist” for raising Lazarus), and Rivas has a feel for its grammar, the nonsequiturs that ring with poetic profundity. One woman “walks like someone who’s just lost her slippers.” Another has “the look of someone who’s just come from fighting with a host of deities in bed.” A customer who informs on them to the police is described as “this bilabial voiceless plosive of a man,” describing the sound of a sputtering exhaust pipe. When a character uses a gun for murder, he cries out in shock, “It’s for killing elephants!”
The juxtaposition of names within the story likewise builds a sense of disorientation. On the one hand, the characters mention authors and books whose names reveal both their and Rivas’s own command of real literary arcana. Julius Fučík, Graciliano Ramos, Ryszard Kapuściński, and Francis Jammes come up in conversation. Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt even appear as characters. Yet many of Rivas’s fictional characters have surreal nicknames that draw attention to them as constructions. The two landlords, a father and son, are Old Nick and Perfect Synthesis. A heavy smoker’s named Boca di Fumo. A group of brothers are the Swallows. Through this technique, Rivas fashions a world in which his people are no more real than what they read, maybe less so. Their experiences are subordinate to their memories. It is the world, in short, of a writer.
The story of The Last Days of Terranova is in the end secondary to its effect. Rivas uses generic tropes not despite their ubiquity but because we’ve all seen them before, because we remember them from somewhere, referenced in our reading or viewing. To encounter a story of this kind set in Galicia with bizarre similes and character names and references plunges us further into the surreal. It also draws our attention to our own recollections and associations —have we misremembered? What else have we seen and done? The novel seeks to give life to the readers’ experiences, to reconcile all the things we’ve been, to breathe life into an old story with memory’s iron lung. As Vicenzo writes, “My memory is an extension of that former respiratory apparatus. In these moments, the distance between the old man I am and the boy I was shrinks to almost nothing.”
[Published by Archipelago Books on November 15, 2022, 312 pages $20.00 US paperback]